Domestic Adventures

According to Emmaline…

If you give a kid a cookie,
She’s going to want the kind of tea that has honey it to go with it.
And if you give her the kind of tea that has honey in it,
She’s going to want to go out to the back porch and have grown-up conversations while she drinks it.
And chances are, if you go out to the back porch and have grown-up conversations,
she’s going to want to dress up like a grown-up.
If she dresses up like a grown-up, she might want to pretend she has kids.
Then you’re gonna have to get her dolls out.
And if you get her dolls out, you’re going to have to give them all names.
And if you give them all names,
you’ll have to pretend they’re alive!
And if they’re alive, they’re going to want cookies also.
And so you’ll have to do it all over again with each one!

I love that my kids love the children’s illustrator exhibits the art museum hosts each summer. Last year’s featured artist was William Joyce, an author and illustrator we dearly love. This year’s artist, Jerry Pinkney, was new to me, though he has illustrated many classics such as Aesop’s Fables, The Ugly Duckling, and Rikki-Tikki-Tavi. We checked out an armload of his books this summer, and it was fun to watch the kids’ eyes light up as they recognized paintings from the different stories. Then we spent some time in the cosy reading area and the kids enjoyed finding the paintings from those books. Rikki-Tikki-Tavi has become a favorite in our house.
Also displayed were rough sketches and drafts. Emmie and I talked about how the drafts were different from the final versions and how the artist changed his ideas around as he went. We looked at the details in the paintings, noticing how in a painting of some mice, the mice looked so real, but when you looked closely you could see he used not just brown or gray paint, but also blue and orange in the fur. It’s fun to take time to notice the details with children.
Can’t wait to see who next year’s illustrator is. I wonder if they take suggestions. Who would you choose?

Emmaline’s reading has really improved over the past several weeks. Not long ago, it was a struggle to get through the sentences in her reading workbook, but suddenly things are clicking and we’ve entered the world of chapter books. It started with the discovery of Mercy Watson - the “porcine wonder”. I love the look of these books. They have wonderful color illustrations on nearly every page, and the print is larger than most chapter books, which is particularly nice since we are still working on some vision issues. The chapters are only three or four pages each and the stories are hilarious. These are books I want to own a collection of.
We’ve also been checking out the Magic Treehouse books at the library. These are just at the upper reaches of Emmaline’s reading level, but each time we sit down with them, her reading gets smoother. We’ve settled into a nice routine of reading together during Isaac’s mid-morning feeding, taking turns reading chapters. It’s turning into one of my favorite times of day.

Inspired by a co-op session on mapmaking, I ordered this book, Mapmaking with Children: Sense of Place Education for the Elementary Years by David Sobel. I just love books like this, about how kids’ thinking develops and why teaching certain concepts is important. Unfortunately, I usually get about a third of the way through such books, jump into the application enthusiastically, and more often than not forget to come back to them. Oops. This book I actually read completely - well, all the relevant parts.
The author discusses how children’s maps reflect their view of the world at that time, how mapmaking gives a sense of ownership to a place thereby encouraging good stewardship, and one of my favorite chapters, how books and maps work together to more fully involve the reader in the story. Besides the theory, there are tons of mapmaking projects divided by age.
We started with a model map of our school room. I made a map with cuisenaire rods and had the kids idenitfy the room and the things in it. Then I used stickers on the map to show where I had hidden pennies around the room for them to find. Once Emmie and Micah had found their little treasures, I left the room and they hid the pennies and marked the map with stickers. I was impressed that even Micah could do this very accurately.
Another day I asked Emmie to draw a picture of the neighborhood. The only thing she had to show on the map was our house, beyond that she could show as much or as little as she wanted. I love how her map of our cul-de-sac turned out. In reality, there are five houses on our street, but she only showed the ones that were important to her: our house, our next door neighbors to the south (defined by Emmie as “the people who keep their cars in the garage”) and the neighbor two doors down who have a very friendly dog. The dog even made it onto the map. Across the street was pictured a small tree in a funny little squared off area and defined as “where we like to park our BigWheels”. We don’t go over there all that often and I had no idea she thought the place was special -makes me want to ensure we visit the little tree more often. The other two houses belong to neighbors we don’t have much interaction with and so it was no surprise that they didn’t show up on her map. After creating her map, Emmie was so excited about it, she wanted to go out and walk around the cul-de-sac visiting all the places she had drawn. She had a great time leading us on this little adventure.
Finally, we used mapmaking for her journal one day while we were reading Charlotte’s Web. Again, not the most accurate map, but it definitely showed all the important places including Charlotte’s place in the doorway and Templeton’s home under the feeding trough.
Though I think we’ve wrapped up our little mapmaking unit for now, I love having these ideas on hand to apply here and there for variety and interest. Besides, it’s a fun way to get inside Emmaline’s head and find out what’s important to her.

My little library has grown over Christmas, and this book, The Creative Family, by Amanda Blake Soule is one of my favorite additions. She also has a lovely and inspiring blog here. I haven’t read all the way through the book yet, but I’ve already got all sorts of ideas brewing. The idea is to just be creative with your children, to foster your own creativity and that of your kids. If you’re a crafty kind of person you already know how relaxing and energizing creating something can be. Just this week, as we’ve started back to school after the holidays, I’ve made a point to sit down to some simple craft with the kids each day after lunch. It’s a break from other school work and it’s just as good for me as it is for them. The first day all we did was color together. With Emmaline I talked about slowing down and coloring all the tiny areas of her detailed fairy picture. With Micah I just brought to his attention that you can color inside the lines if you so choose. It was fun. Simple. Relaxing. We’ve also done this cool salt paint project (thanks, Valerie) and made animal collages with textured fabric. I have in mind little sewing projects from the book and am really excited to try making the natural dye Soule describes.
Our old kitchen table, now on the back porch, has become our crafting spot. The porch is pleasant and messes seem easier to deal with out there. I’m toying with the idea of setting up a little creative nook there and consolidating our crafting supplies in a cabinet on the porch. My only fear is the humidity. Ideas, anyone? I’m envisioning a beautiful little creative back porch space, but I’m afraid practicality might intrude. Updates on that to come.

A while back, a friend gave us a box full of children’s book including several science books. Emmaline immediately gravitated to this book about rocks and minerals. The section on crystals with all its beautiful photographs was the favorite and when Emmie saw a sidebar about growing your own crystals she couldn’t wait to try it out. The only problem was the instructions called for ammonia and laundry blueing and about a dozen other items I didn’t have or didn’t want to deal with. Trent wisely suggested we grow sugar crystals instead. Brilliant!

We followed simple instructions like these and didn’t have to buy a thing. The only thing we did different was to soak our wooden skewers for a few minutes then roll them in sugar to “seed” them. Once the sugar was dried onto them, we put them in the super-saturated sugar solution. Also, because we sometimes have ant problems, we set our jar in a cake pan with water making a shallow moat the ants can’t cross.
It took a couple of weeks, but I was really pleased with the results. Our crystals turned out even more beautiful than I expected and Trent used some pattern blocks to illustrate to Emmaline how crystals grow and why they look so clear. And of course, our crystals made delicious snacks as well!

We borrowed Stuart Murphy’s book, Probably Pistachio from the library last week and have been enjoying it. The most fun part was that the kids had never tried pistachio ice cream before, so I picked some up at the grocery store - for educational purposes of course. We’ve discovered a new favorite ice cream! Unfortunately, they can’t see to get the name right and keep asking for “mustachio”.

I’m still in love with my library. Click, click, click….and I have books in the mail. Most recently I’ve found these cool math-related books…

A Fair Bear Share by Stuart J. Murphy is great for introducing the concept of expanded form. The Button Box by Margarette S. Reid is especially fun if you have a box of buttons around the house. There’s lots of sorting and counting and imagining to be done.

These science books are a huge hit at our house…

The kids have been carrying around bean bag chairs on their backs pretending to be snails all week. Very slimy.

According to the Royal Shakespeare Company, “Shakespeare should be taught to children as young as four, before they have become intimidated by the language.” It turns out this is the thought of many educators, which is an encouragement to me since Shakespeare is one of the topics I’m assigned to teach at co-op thjs fall. Though I am a great lover of literature, I was a bit intimidated by the idea of introducing Shakespeare to kids as young as five - no, wait, as young as three (though theirs will be a much simplified version of the older kids’ class). Today, though, help arrived in the mail. Shakespeare for Kids is full of background information and craft ideas. I’ve flipped through it and it looks pretty good. Starting with Shakespeare had really impressed me. It’s custom made for introducing young children to Shakespeare’s work in a classroom setting, though it has me wishing I had weeks instead of hours to teach. Perhaps we’ll do a unit study on Shakespeare here at home. The teaching philosophies of the authors is sound and it offers real practical help on how to approach the works in a fun way as well as breaking down several plays into “kidspeak” with a touch of “shakespeak.”
Exciting year ahead.

I’ve been on a bit of a William Joyce kick ever since our visit to the museum. I’ve got several books ordered from the library but one I really could not resist purchasing (especially used for 2.98!) was The World of William Joyce Scrapbook. It’s Joyce’s explaination of how he started drawing and writing, how he gets his ideas, and how he turns those ideas into books. It’s full of sketches at various stages, as well as quirky facts about the author and how he spends his time. Emmaline and I read through the book as soon as it arrived and as we finished the last page, Emmie immediately leapt off the couch and announced she was going to write a book. So off she went and wrote a book about Wormy. Just like Joyce, she claims, she was inspired by her childhood toys.
As a kid, I was very interested in writing and drawing and I would have absolutely loved this book then - in fact, I love it just as much now.