It has been a long time since I’ve participated in Natalie’s weekly reading blog, and I wanted to take the time to share what we’re reading.

Three of our books this week – What the World Eats, The Little House and My Town were related to our Moving Beyond the Page “Communities” studies. I had seen a photo essay on What the World Eats some time ago. It really is an amazing book, and a great way to share how different things can be in other cultures with your children. Not only in the sense of how different foods are, but the families that are depicted are also very interesting. Tornado Boy and I only hit the highlights in the book as it is quite long, but this is one that I will definitely consider adding to our family library. The book is very thought-provoking and will really make you consider what you eat.

Tornado Boy noticed right away that “The Little House” used personification to share the experiences of the house in the book. “Houses don’t have feelings!” he said. The house starts off in the country then experiences many changes over time as a city grows up around it. We had never talked about personification, and the book was intended to depict the differences between rural and urban living, but we ended up with two lessons for one this time.

My Town is a very good book for both talking about maps and communities. It’s an Usborne book that we happened to catch used on Amazon. The book talks about a lot of the types of things you’d find in a community and also has fold out maps to use with it on the front and back covers. Ted and his friend, Josie share lots of information about their town and how it’s changed over time.

The Story of Ferdinand and the The Velveteen Rabbit were both selections that we saw performed as plays at a Children’s Theater. Both are classic storybooks. More than anything, this led Tornado Boy and I to talk about how adaptations (either to plays or films) don’t always follow the exact story of the original book. The Velveteen Rabbit book was nearly identical to the play, but Ferdinand was quite different. Since the copyright has expired on the Velveteen Rabbit and it’s now a public domain book, you can read it online here or download a digital copy of it here.

You can find out what other young children are reading this week over at Mouse Grows, Mouse Learns.

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

I was sent a copy of Good Morning, God by Davis Carman as part of my membership in the TOS Homeschool Crew. The book is published by Apologia Press and sells for $14. The short book has an intended audience of children ages 1-8. You can download a sample chapter here.

The book is intended to be read once per day for a week. It gives suggestions about how a young child can build a relationship with God. It shows all of the ways that you can incorporate God into your life – through prayer, being mindful, positive actions and thoughts. The book uses black and white as well as color illustrations to show how the child can improve their relationship each day of the week. After the story part of the book, there is a “Questions and Activities” section that gives suggestions of activities, conversation topics and Bible verses that you can read with your child. There are eight of these suggestions for each day of the week. The depth to which a family could cover these would be dependent on the age and abilities of the child.

If you think this is something that your family would enjoy, there’s also a companion 32-page coloring book available for $4.

If you’d like to see what other TOS Review Crew members think of this book, you can visit our Crew blog.

Thanks so much for reading!

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

Disclaimer: I am a member of The Old Schoolhouse Review Crew for 2010-2011 and receive free products and services in exchange for a thorough and honest review. Though I am compensated with free products, I am not compensated in the form of cash for my reviews. My reviews will always reflect my honest opinions, findings, beliefs and experiences with the products and services that I have received.

We received the book and DVD set called Nanuq (part of the My Animal Family series) from Smart Kids Productions. The book is written by Kathleen Duey and illustrated by Lara Gurin. The 31-page book is the story of Nanuq – a young polar bear, and his time with his brother, Suka, and his mother. The book is really a gateway to a learning adventure. On the inside cover there is a DVD as well as a card with information about how to join the My Animal Family (MAF) Kids Club. The card has the has the website address (http://www.MAFKidsClub.com) as well as a password for registering this book. The book includes a six month subscription for the habitat that goes along with this particular book.

The MAF website contains two sections for each book – a game section and an art-related section. The book/DVD set retails for $12.99 and is the passport to the website. MAF club members get a 25% discount on additional books, making them $9.75. Currently there are 5 books in the series – Nanuq (polar bears), Leo (lions), Ella (elephants), Kurow (chimpanzees) and Tahi (dolphins). Each book contains the companion DVD and a passcode for the habitat that the animal lives in. People can also purchase extended time on the website on a monthly basis for $5.99, or a 6-month or 1 year membership for all of the habitats. A 14 day trial is also available. I am a little concerned because the website states that there are going to be 24 books in the series, but so far there are only 5 – 4 were published in 2008 and 1 in 2009.

I was incredibly impressed with the DVD content that accompanies the book. It is taken from BBC footage and geared to young children. It is a beautiful companion to the book and continues the story of Nanuq with gorgeous footage of his arctic habitat. It also has a fun facts section (these actually also show up in the online game website, so it helps to pay attention!) There is a song on the disc as well. I really enjoyed watching the DVD with Tornado Boy. You can see a sample clip of the elephant DVD here.

The “Paint and Play” art section of the Nanuq website has fun activities that are centered on polar bears and their arctic habitat. Kids can paint by number, print coloring sheets, dot to dots and other art games. The “In The Habitat” game section, your child creates and avatar and explores the habitat by playing games and earn points to “buy” virtual gear to be able to do more in the environment. The games are leveled and higher level games earn more points. While the website is geared for 4-8 year olds, it may be tough for the youngest children to advance in the games without help. Some of the interface is a little difficult – in the picture below, the child has to “walk” their avatar across the game sign in order to play, they can’t just click the sign. Overall, though, the games are fun and good learning experiences. They involve literacy, math, puzzles and science facts.

My overall impression of this book series is very positive. The book and DVD combo is well done and a good value. I liked it enough that I’ve ordered a copy of the Leo book for Tornado Boy for Christmas. I’m not sure how much we’ll use the website for the games, but we’ll definitely enjoy the book and DVD.

If you’d like to see what other TOS Review Crew members think of this product, you can visit our Crew blog.

Thanks so much for reading!

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

Disclaimer: I am a member of The Old Schoolhouse Review Crew for 2010-2011 and receive free products and services in exchange for a thorough and honest review. Though I am compensated with free products, I am not compensated in the form of cash for my reviews. My reviews will always reflect my honest opinions, findings, beliefs and experiences with the products and services that I have received.

Overheard this week:

Tornado Boy was talking to his Cordouroy stuffed animal this weekend when I heard him say:

“Cordouroy, you’re really lucky because you’re the main character in your story and that means that you’re really, really important!”.

Darn… I guess he was listening, after all!

Find out what other kids are saying, or link up and post your own story at Tiny Talk Tuesday at Not Before 7.

©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 were very heavy on the Amy Krouse Rosenthal books in our household this week. Tornado Boy loved two of them, but I really didn’t care for the third – It’s Not Fair. The book was far too whiny and had a lot of sibling rivalry, so it really didn’t apply in our household.

As a precursor to my review, I really want to share this old video of a 17-month old Tornado Boy. He has the most precious belly laugh and we so rarely get to hear it any more.

I was very thankful that “The Wonder Book” brought back the belly laugh. Tornado Boy thought some of the poems were absolutely hysterical. For some reason the one based on the jump rope rhyme “Miss Mary Mack” really sent him into gales of laughter. I read it like you sing the chant and he seemed to really appreciate that. The book has many different poems and is such a fun read. It does have some mild potty humor like “Tinkle, Tinkle, In the Sea, Don’t look under, While I pee…..” so if that bothers you, you may want to skip it. My little boy absolutely loved this book. I think we may have to purchase this one.

Yes Day was also a big hit. It’s pretty much every little kid’s biggest fantasy come true. One day per year, the little boy’s parents say yes to everything – pizza for breakfast, staying up late, etc. Tornado Boy requested this book several nights this week. I do feel bad because Tornado Boy hears no more often than the average kid. Between being insanely curious and having several food sensitivities, we have to say no more than I’d like. I’m really working to make sure that I try to say yes more often.

We found Bilby Moon on the One More Story website. It’s about a bilby – an Australian marsupial who resembles a large-eared rat. He becomes concerned when he notices that the moon is disappearing. The story is well done and features a lot of Australian animals that we needed to look up afterwards. I found it interesting that Tornado Boy has forgotten a lot of the things that we learned about the moon during a unit study that we did last August. It’s time to dig out the lapbook again and do a refresher.

You can find out what other preschoolers are reading this week over at Mouse Grows, Mouse Learns.

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

Tornado Boy has been struggling a bit with the concept of greater than and less than with numbers lately. We read More or Less to help him to better understand how numbers relate to one another. More or Less tells the story of a school carnival and its dunking booth. Eddie asks questions to guess people’s ages. If he fails, he gets dunked. Tornado Boy and I have used the techniques in the book (minus the dunking) to play the “guess my number” game. It’s definitely helping him to remember the order of numbers. There’s a cute song here and some ideas about using a chomping alligator to help teach the greater than and less than signs.

I ordered Ladybug Girl and Bumblebee Boy through the library last week when I was looking for books about friendship. This one is really good and will appeal to both boys and girls. Tornado Boy was a bit concerned with the kids were working through what they were going to play together – “They don’t look like friends” he said. The negotiating that the children go through is a good lesson in listening to what other people want to do, too. The kids in the book have a great imagination and I’m curious if the rest of the Ladybug Girl girl series willl appeal to TB.

Duck for President is by the same woman – Doreen Cronin who wrote Click, Clack, Moo. This book was a little bit of a stretch for our patriotic theme, but it does take a look at voting to elect leadership. This book follows Ducks adventures – first he runs against Farmer Brown to run the farm, and then he sets his sites on his state and then our country. This book is a cute intro to our election process.

You can find out what other preschoolers are reading this week over at Mouse Grows, Mouse Learns.

©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.

Duck At The Door was our “fun” book of the week. The cover illustration caught my eye at the library. Max the duck has decided that he doesn’t want to fly south for the winter. The book tells the story of what happens when Max knocks on Irene’s door. She already has quite the menagerie of pets and she lets Max stay. You’ll have to read the book to see how Max does with the rest of the animals. This book was pretty cute and there are a couple of other books in this series. I think we’ll check out Duck Soup next.

Tornado Boy had camp this past week and he really surprised me on the way in on Monday when he expressed some concerns about not knowing how to make a friend. This struck me as very odd since he’s a really outgoing kid with a pretty strong core group of friends, one of whom was also going to be at camp. I gave him some advice and took his concern to heart. A couple of our picks this week revolved around friendship. The best was the book How To Be A Friend. It’s part of the “Dino Life Guides” series of book and it’s illustrated by the same man who writes the “Arthur” books. This is a good book about friendship. It talks about how to make a friend, deal with conflict, shyness, deal with people in general and how not to be a friend in a kid-friendly manner. It touches on bullies and how to deal with them, too. This book has concrete suggestions and really handles the topic well.

Can I Play Too is also about friendship, but it’s a lot more playful than the other book. We love Mo Willems and we had read several of his books (Knuffle Bunny, Edwina the Dinosaur), but this is the first of the books featuring Elephant and Piggie that we had read. One of the things that I really liked about this book is how expressive it is. It’s simple, but very fun. Elephant and Piggie are getting ready to play catch when Snake appears and wants to play, too. It’s worth reading the book to see how they resolve the issue.

We read a couple of other Elephant & Piggie books as well. They’re cute and short and great for reading when you only have time for a quick story.

Tune in tomorrow to hear about the book Stars, Stars, Stars!

You can find out what other preschoolers are reading this week over at Mouse Grows, Mouse Learns.

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

We read Red, White & Blue this week on honor of Flag Day. I really think that Tornado Boy may end up being something of a history buff. We watched the entire PBS Liberty’s Kids series last fall and while it really is meant for older children, TB loved it. (Note: you can stream the entire Liberty’s Kids series through Netflix now.) I was really pleased when we read Red, White and Blue because it was quite apparent that he actually retained a lot of the information that he learned while watching Liberty’s Kids. Red, White and Blue discusses some of the history of our country’s flag. It talks about the theories of the original design and how the it was changed over the years as our country grew. It does mention several of the wars that occurred, so this book may not be a good choice for a sensitive child.

Inside Your Outside is one of the Cat in the Hat books that is “in the style of” Dr. Seuss, i.e. not written by the original author. The book is cute and the illustrations are fun, but it’s certainly not the most accurate book around. If you’re looking for a biology book for a preschooler, this one is probably “good enough”.

We checked this book about Venus Flytraps out at the library this week. We wanted to learn more about them since we’ve been working on growing one. The most important thing that we learned is that each trap can only eat three times and then it turns black and dies. I was concerned about this because our plant is clearly healthy and growing and we didn’t know why pieces of it were dying off. It turns out that they’d done their job – providing nitrogen to the plant. This book is very interesting and has many good facts and pictures. We loved it.

Great Big Book of Mighty Machines was Tornado Boy’s pick at the library. If your child is in love with anything that moves, this book is a great pick. The book features lots of information on all kinds of trucks, cars, farm equipment and monster trucks. It also has a good glossary in the back of the book. Any book that features “Grave Digger” and a monorail is a huge win in Tornado Boy’s eyes.

You can find out what other preschoolers are reading this week over at Mouse Grows, Mouse Learns.

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