Spanglish Books

We have continued in our Spanish lessons, but it is really hard for me to help the kids review at home.  For one, even when I know the words, I don't have a lot of confidence in how to put together a sentence correctly or how to use the right case.  I was reading Spanish picture books to the kids, but my pronunciation is definitely lacking!  Fortunately, I've found several "Spanglish" books that I can read and I think they help the kids learn a little vocabulary too. 

The Moon is La Luna is a book of clever rhymes - I've been reading it to the kids pretty often and they have memorized several of them, they are funny, like:

To say chair is Spanish is silla.

(See-ya is how it is said.)

So if your friends, to you, say "See ya!"

Yell "CHAIR!" to them instead.

Susan Middleton Elya is an author I've discovered.  She's written several Spanglish books - Say Hola to Spanish, Say Hola to Spanish Otra Vez (Again), Say Hola to Spanish at the Circus, Oh no!  Gotta Go! and others.  All of them are mostly English, but when a Spanish word is introduced, it's done in a way that the reader will be able to figure out the meaning contextually and usually the Spanish word rhymes with a preceeding English word, which helps with the pronunciation.   

Clearly books like these aren't enough to teach you how to speak or understand Spanish, but I think every little bit helps.  And the kids are picking up bits here and there, at least as much as they can without having an actual abuela - a Spanish speaking grandma - but we are pretty partial to the grandmas we have, so that will have to do for now :)

My favorite picture from Last Week

Just Off the Nightstand: The Wreck of the Titan

Although Caleb’s fascination with the Titanic seems to have lost first status, he still draws the Titanic sinking – with lifeboats in the background – at least as often as he draws anything else. A few weeks ago, I bought a book for him at a rummage sale written by the man who led the expedition to find it. It referenced a book written in 1898 called Futility. The book was later republished under the title The Wreck of the Titan. In The Wreck of the Titan, a super ship, named the Titan, hits an iceberg and sinks. There is a shortage of lifeboats and most of the passengers are lost. Sounds familiar doesn’t it? The speed of the ship, location of the iceberg, and length of the ship are also all comparable with those of the Titanic. Because of the coincidences, some people thought and think that the book foretold the disaster of the Titanic.

Interested (especially because the book is really a novella), I found it through our library published in a book called The Wreck of the Titanic Foretold? edited by Martin Gardner. Gardner has complied stories and poems about ships colliding with icebergs – all of which seem to foretell the Titanic wreck. But, Gardner is skeptical – and his reasoning leads the reader to be so too. The fear of colliding with an iceberg was not unwarranted 100 years ago. As ships began being built larger and larger, it was natural to imagine what would happen if a ship carrying two or three thousand people hit an iceberg and sank. And what would happen would not be all that unique compared to any other ship hitting one – a tragedy.

The book also contained an excerpt from the book From the Old World to the New by W.T. Stead and the short story “The White Ghost of Disaster” by M.C. Garnett. Both of them are about ships hitting icebergs – the white ghost story is more parallel to the Titanic than the Stead book. However, W.T. Stead (who was a sort of psychic in his day) actually died on the Titanic. There were also 3 poems about iceberg shipwrecks (2 written before the disaster). I began to get the feeling that people were just as fascinated with a Titanic-like tragedy before it happened as they have been since it happened. The contrast between an enormous, opulent, modern ship and a simple iceberg is sharp. I thought Garner summed it up well by quoting Carl Sandburg’s poem The People, Yes:

“Is that an iceberg on the horizon, Captain?”
“Yes, Madam”
“What if we get into a collision with it?”
“The iceberg, Madam, will move right along as if nothing had happened.”

Now that's chilling!

Mouse Art

I swiped this idea right off the website - Splish Splash Splatter. I've mentioned this art blog before - it's kept by an art teacher who has a lot of great ideas. She also does lots of projects based on books and if you check out her blog you can sort her posts labeled "Literature" and find them all. I'm hoping to do a few more of her projects soon.

First we read Mouse Paint - which is a very simple book about primary and secondary colors.

I followed the teacher's example and taught C & A how to draw a mice using "C"s.  Caleb got it, Annalise...asked me to draw hers for her.  And while I wanted her to draw them and see her cute little not-perfect mice, I have this theory that little kids sometimes like to watch a grown up do something that the grown up is trying to get them to do - and sometimes they get just as much out of that.  It's a theory.  I guess we'll see how that works out.


Mouse by Caleb



I drew the mice, but she added the tails and faces.  Teamwork!

And as you may have guessed, as soon as the mice were painted, Annalise mixed all the colors (I rescued their mice before they got painted over) and I think that is ok too.

Work Together - Accomplish Twice as Much

This was one of those things the kids do when I am working on something downstairs and they are playing happily upstairs. I'm not saying they've done *this* before, just *this* is the sort of thing they do. On one hand, I love how creatively they worked together and how sweet it was when they announced to me that they had put all of their "babies" down for a nap. On the other hand they used every single pillow we have and every single towel or blanket they could find.

I've got to say, knowing that this is all picked up and put away and that in the end it wasn't that big of a mess, I really like it :)

The Fourth Day of PEP

Today's topic was sled dogs.  Sled dogs were probably the best loved part of our home study of Alaska, so I had high hopes for this day.  However, I really had a hard time planning because I couldn't find an age appropriate craft or a game that I thought really fit the topic.  I finally decided I would have the kids run a relay (because by 11:20 they all needed to run anyway) and have them pass off some of our stuffed dogs, but inspiration struck Thursday night - sled dogs carried mail, why not have a mail carrying relay where they passed letters - and so much less to tote back and forth for me! 

I really think the mail relay idea would have been a great one with an older age group.  This age group didn't know what a relay was, plus I hadn't found a good way to help the kids remember which team they were on and once we had them all spread out on their starting points, only the kids nearest me could hear what was going on - well at least we can all learn from my mistakes.  In the end, the kids passed on their envelopes to whoever would take it and everyone just kept on running.  Once they got to the kid playing postmaster, they ran him over and no one remember to give him the mail.  Everybody wins!  yea!

Once we got back inside, I gave all the kids a coloring page that had a sled dog team with a musher.  I also gave each table a couple of library books that had pictures of sled dogs or huskies (I read the best sled dogs are usually more or less mutts - or really a mix of certain kinds of dogs) and told them (rather than read) the story or Balto.  That all went pretty smoothly and actually since we ran a relay they kind of understood how the dog teams had to take turns carrying the medicine.  I also tried to read to them the story Painter and Ugly while they finished up, but it was hard to show the pictures, they were all hungry to the point of grumpiness, and I ran out of time.  All in all, not bad I think :)

Wordless Wednesday

The Third Day of PEP

Whew, half way through!  I am kind of ready for this to be over!  But honestly it went pretty good.  Our theme was the Northern Lights.  I had always planned for this class to be mostly an art class.  First thing, we took 'em out to the playground and had them climb around for a little while.  Then we went back to the classroom and I showed them a book with pictures of the Northern Lights in it.  The book was way too complicated to try to read to them.  I really don't feel like I understand how they work myself.  I told the kids that the earth is a big magnet and that all the time there are teeny tiny bits of the sun (particles) being drawn toward the earth. The tiny bits are most attracted to the top and bottom (my book had a very good drawing of this) and depending on what they are made of, they appear as different colored lights.  The kids really seemed to like the book. 

The art project was to paint Northern Lights using water colors.  I split the group up in two to have half play with magnets while the other half painted.  It ended up being that as one kid finished, another kid would take his or her place.  That was not how I planned it, but it worked very smoothly.  The magnets were a gamble - I did not do a trial run at home, but they were a big hit.  Plus all the kids loooooooved getting to paint.  I loooooooove water colors because they make anyone an artist! 



Nice picture of anonymous kids painting!

 

Finished paintings.

I really like how different they all are!  The idea was to paint the lights and then fill in all the white with black poster paint.  Some of the kids understood that better than others!  Two notes - you might see in the picture that I used those no-spill snack containers for water - I do that at home.  It really helps slow down a spill.  And water colors, I think they need to be treated with respect.  You can't dab at a water color or you will ruin it.  C&A helped me come up with the analogy of petting a tiny kitten to explain how to gently transfer color to your brush. 

So did they learn a lot about Alaska....maybe not, but really I think all I can do is inspire them to want to learn more.  Next week - Balto!  yay!

Shark Fin Cupcakes

Since his birthday fell on a Friday, I decided to take cupcakes for Caleb's class at PEP. Going along with our shark theme, I found some shark fin cupcakes online to copy.  The ones I thought would be easiest to do called for making a fin shaped cookie using a heart shaped cookie cutter.  They iced each fin with gray royal icing, but I decided just to make gray cookies - since I already had to get black food coloring for the shark cake.  I used the tiniest amount and was very happy with the color.

This picture shows three stages - heart, then tilt the top of the tin, then smash in the top (bottom) - in hindsight, I should have just cut off the bottom.



The finished product!



I shouldn't have bothered making the fins, the kids gobbled them up so fast, I don't think they even noticed.  But...Caleb did and he liked them, so I guess that made it worth it.  I did think the fins were too big, a problem I usually have when planning special cupcakes - I forget how small they are!

Six



Very pleased with his cake :), which I copied from an idea I saw online and please don't search for the original, I did not do it justice!



His gift from Annalise

It was a very "Sharky" birthday!





"The bows are my smile."

Breaking in the new drawing book before bedtime.

Summer Reading

I read two books this summer - and they both had things in common that made them different from the type of book I usually read "for fun". 

A.  Both of them were non-fiction
B.  Both of them were written by living authors.

Other than that, they were pretty polar -the first book I read was A World Undone: The Story of the Great War by G.J. Meyer.  Before I read this book, I knew basically two things about World War I

1.  It was started by the assassination of Franz Ferdinand.
2.  It preceded World War II.

We're talking serious ignorance here.  The book was written chronologically, but each chapter was followed by a section highlighting some additional information - the specific history of some interesting person, details about a certain area of political thought, or more depth about tactics or weapons.  I can appreciate the nitty gritty details of a chronological report, but I really needed the break with the background information!  What a horrible war - and what horrible waste of human lives, natural resources, food, and money.  And all that horribleness was just deepened when I realized at the end that it was just paving a pathway into World War II.  I can recommend this book for it's readability - and because there is nothing good from being ignorant of the mistakes and miscommunication that caused this war. 

The other book I read was The Privileged Planet: How Our Place in the Cosmos is Designed for Discovery by Guillermo Gonzalez and Jay Richards.  This book was a hard read for me because so much of it was out of my league.  The basic argument of the book, I understand.  The details of the defense...I just have to take their word for it.  I don't know much about astronomy or physics.   To explain the basic argument, it's easiest to take a quote from the book (pg. 218):

...the rare conditions required for habitability also provide excellent overall conditions for discovering the universe around us.

I think that all of us have at one time or another marvelled at how the earth is not too close to and not too far from the sun.  All the kids' "why" questions make me do that!  But I never really thought about how our atmosphere makes us able to view distant space or would ever have considered that this is unusual.  The book gave huge amounts of information about Earth's uniqueness both in its' ability to sustain living beings and its' placement in the universe in general. 

It also spoke to an issue that has always fascinated me - size - why is the sky so big and an ant so small?  You can think of the earth as this tiny speck in the behemoth vastness of space and let that make you feel insignificantly small...but...and they broke this down on a table (pg. 216) - human beings are very near the middle size-wise if you look at the very largest things we can observe (the diameter of the observable universe) and the very smallest things we can measure (quarks).  To me that is amazing! 

While not as readable, this book did help me think about some things I wasn't really considering and you will probably like it a lot if you're interested in the earth, astronomy, or extra-terrestrials. 

So after all that, I am definitely going to read some fiction! 

Night Safari

Another project from Shinglee Kindergarten art:


First draw a safari animal



Add details - don't forget the moon and stars!

Fill in the night sky with black - in the book they used black poster paint, but we used oil pastels.



Caleb liked it so much, he made two!


A lot of the projects in the book call for oil pastels, and you can definitely use crayons in their place, but...crayons don't have quite as satisfying color.   Our oil pastels are actually MY oil pastels and used only when Mommy brings them out of their hiding place.

The Second Day of PEP

Today was our second day of enrichment - and since the class I am teaching is only 6 weeks long, I am 1/3 of the way through it.  It went a lot better this time - I started off by taking them to the playground and they were pretty wiggly, so they played really hard - plus it was really hot, so after 10 minutes we gathered on a blanket and I read them a book called Building an Igloo.  (Today's theme was native Alaskans).  Although they were very interested in the igloo book, the concept of a "native American" of any sort was extremely foreign to all of them - even Caleb seemed clueless, and we read a lot about American Indians when we studied Arizona.  So I just generalized and told them we were learning about people who live in Alaska.  After the igloo book, we played a game called Caribou Eyes, which is a real native Alaskan game.  The original version has "it" stand in the middle of a circle and ask each person in the circle what animal they are - then they stomp on the foot of one of the people in the circle, causing them to break the circle and "it" runs off.  Whoever tags "it" becomes "it".  I omitted the foot stomping and told "it" just to look for an opening and run through it.  The girl I chose to be "it" first, was super fast, they ran a loooong time before anyone caught her.  She was so fast, they were too hot and tired to play the next round.  Even the kid who caught her didn't want to do it again!  Regardless, that tired them out pretty much perfectly and they were able to sit nicely and do the craft - which was the hats I posted about a few weeks ago.

They turned out super cute - and were a big hit with the moms picking the kids up :)  We didn't even have time to do the sky tossing (definitely getting moved to a different day) or read The Polar Bear Son - which is probably my favorite of the fiction books I selected for the class.  So that is success in my book - I'd definitely rather not finish everything than finish too early. 

When we got home, I pulled my purse out of the van and my camera flew out of it.  It hit the ground with a petite sounding crack - and my heart just sank.  These digital gadgets are just too fragile!  It had come apart at the top and I could not get it to turn on.  Later on though, I popped the top back together (mostly) and it started working again...whew...

And speaking of working cameras - Natalie seems to have started walking.  She does it on a part-time basis.  She walked quite a bit a few nights ago and then crawled for several days.  Tonight she walked a lot when she noticed we clapped for her when she did it.  So we shall see if this is it. 

just coincidentally also wearing the Yu'pik Woman hat!

Primping

For the record, Annalise has now grown back enough hair to actually need a headband :)  And I do my best to keep the scissors out of her reach!

Then and Now

See if you can guess which one is which? 






It really is a shame that the picture of us rapping the BCM announcements is at my parents' house in Arkansas!

Wordless Wednesday

California

Well August is over so it's time for our monthly state report.  This month we studied California.  




(excellent state coloring page from crayola.com, we have done one like this every month)

 

California was pretty interesting.  One of the first books we read was called Baby Whale Rescue: The True Story of J.J.  It was about a baby whale that was discovered alone off the coast of California.  She was taken to Sea World and cared for until she was too big to keep.  The kids found it very interesting.  The next one was a bigger hit with Caleb - it was Breakout!  Escape from Alcatraz.  Rob and I went to Alcatraz on our honeymoon and we have pictures of each of us behind bars.  I showed the kids the pictures and they demanded some explanations! 

Another thing we have done each month is a craft using the outline of the state.  I started out cutting out the shape of the border and letting them color a pattern underneath, but for the last 2 states we've made a collage from travel books.  I think that has turned out nicer and reinforced what they'd been learning about the state.

For our California meal we had San Diego style fish tacos.  It was really pretty easy to make.

Annalise approved :)

I served pinto beans on the side.  They grow pinto beans in California, but that's not the only place they grow, I just thought it would go well with tacos.

And for dessert!  Earthquake cookies!

Ok Ok, they are chocolate crinkles, but I like calling them Earthquake Cookies better.  There is an actual Earthquake Cake, but it called for a lot of ingredients I did not have on hand. 

A lot of people have asked me what I am using for our state studies or what I expect the kids to learn.  We are just getting videos and books from the library and requesting travel brochures online.  I expect them to learn where the state is and get a general idea of its shape.  Beyond that I hope they find one or two unique things about that state that interests them.  I am learning a lot of interesting things myself! 

First Day of PEP 2011

I remember to snap a quick picture before we rushed out the door this morning:

Annalise saw me dressing Natalie and wanted to be twinkies - we got the matching flower shirts as hand-me-downs.

My Alaska class went pretty well. I have been really nervous about the planning, what to do if we ran out of things to do or if the kids were totally uninterested in it, and I was really focused on those things without remember that I had the 3rd class of the day with 4 and 5 year olds. Last year, the 2nd class for that age group was a playground and snack time. For whatever reason, they did not include that this year! So when I got to them at 11:20, some of the kids were spinning (literally), utterly unable to be even slightly still. After a sort of false start, we went outside and the kids ran back and forth across the field - I gave them a sticker each time they ran out to a far tree and came back - some of them got 4 stickers! so that really helped and I realize I am going to have to be prepared for this next week. I am just going to have to work in a physical activity into the first 15-20 minutes.

In other news, Natalie has made big improvements in her baby signs.  Here she is signing "shoes"

And this little girlie loves her shoes! She brings them to me all day and signs "please" for me to put them on. She has also learned how to say "more" (sometimes she signs "more" too - actually her "shoes" in the picture looks more like "more" but she just hasn't figured out the way to hold her hands for "shoes") - sometimes her "more" just means "some" since sometimes she asks for more of something she doesn't have yet! Aaaaand she surprised me very much by picking the cover off of an electrial outlet. Yeah, so much for babyproofing.