Mike and Mary Anne

 This is the book we tackled last week. It reminded me a little of a book we already had at home (we get these from the library) and had a similar theme. When I got out our own book- surprise! It's by the same author, so it was fun to compare the two. So the story of this book is of a man who loves and cares for his steam shovel and likes to think they do great work. However, newer and better Diesel shovels are produced which renders his obsolete. Rather than send her to the junkyard, he finds a new purpose for them both. The kids loved this book, and I'm happy that even if a book is obviously old- fashioned, they aren't dissuaded.

 Since Mike takes great care of Mary Anne (the steam shovel), we talked about things we could take care of. I got out Chore Chart sheets and they chose a few jobs. Unfortunately I kept up with them very poorly this week, so it's more of a long term goal.

 I chose to take care of a huge pile of branches in the backyard. Hannah tried to rake enough leaves for a jumping pile, but it was so hot we couldn't do very much. Baby steps, I guess.

 In the meantime, Hannah is learning some basic fractions, so lemons and bread became their snack.

 And she's working with pennies, nickels, and dimes. It was nice to see a few light bulb moments when she figured out easier ways to count.

                                    This is just an embarrassing future picture for Mr. Colin. :)

 Since Mike is always saying Mary Anne can dig as much in a day as 100 men could dig in a week, we had a digging contest with beans, a cookie dough scoop, and an Iphone timer.

                                They loved it so much they had Dax play when he got home.

 Here's our score sheet. As you can see, we were really twiddling our thumbs when it was Colin's turn- haha

 We also talked about personification since Mary Anne had eyes and a shovel mouth. We found otehr books in our collection that used it and some toys around the house. Then the kids had to find any two things in the house they could add human features to. Hannah chose a doorknob and a flower pot- both looking a little like they came from the mind of Tim Burton.
Speaking of that, we also watched an episode from Pee Wee's Playhouse, another blast from the past. Talk about creepy personification! But it was really fun to see all those old characters.

Along with that video, we had a lot to choose from this week. One person wrote a nice song to go with the story and posted it on YouTube, so that was a good way to introduce music. Someone else made the entire book into a stop-animation video! Pretty neat. 
 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K3wTj-0pMwY
Of course being me, I was suddenly imagining my own stop-animation genius and looked up how to get started. I quickly came to my senses and figured I'd save it for an off week rather than try to fit it in now.

 For art, our Five in a Row book suggested we take notice of the different illustrations of trees in the book. We did that and added a bunch more from other books we owned. They tried lots of variety and did a great job noticing the details from each illustrator. Here's Chloe's.

 And Hannah's. She also learned to do a bit of shading and has been adding it into her regular artwork.

 We read some companion books about construction work since the steam shovel helped build canals, roads, airfields, and basements. We learned about construction zones and workers as well as the basics of building a house. The girls were fascinated that behind our walls are pipes and cords. They took a look under the bathroom sink- don't mind the paint spattered floor we will replace soon- or so we've been saying for a few months...

 Superbatman is checking out the water heater.

 We then designed our own houses. Hannah included shingles, siding, and bricks, as well as a variety of trees now that she had some new skills-  and I know she would never have thought of any of that  before.  She even chose a house number- 32040

              They completed their first verbal multiple choice quiz and got all the answers :)

 I was really looking forward to Science day because I've had an experiment planned for ages. I was never science-minded as a kid and it seemed like experiments didn't really work for me, so this time I was anxious to see it work. First we went over the basics of solid, liquid, and gas.

 We took 2 cups of water and boiled it then froze it so we could see all the states of matter. We also made sure to use a lid so we could watch the transition from gas back to liquid. I reminded them of the water cycle we talked about last summer and they watched a Magic School Bus episode about that exact thing. So handy!

After watching a video of a real steam shovel, steam boat, and steam engine, we talked about how the steam powers the equipment. The night before, I set it all up to create a steam boat. The instructions were only drawn, no photos or proof of it actually working so I ended up having to tweak a few things. Basically, there's a metal cigar tube (thank you Dax for getting us one) filled with water and suspended by wire above a wooden "boat." Too bad the wire and metal made the wood too heavy to float so I put in all on a pool toy. I put water in the tube, stopped it with a cork which had a nail hole through it. Tea lights underneath heated the water inside to boiling, making steam come out the cork...which would supposedly propel the boat forward.

Unfortunately now the boat could float, but was too heavy for the tiny bit of steam to move it. However, it did let out steam puffs and hiss like it was supposed to, so the kids were pretty happy with that. : )

This week we have off due to my needing to go out of town for two days. Chloe will also meet her preschool teachers this week during school time so we decided to pick up where we left off next week: the story of Creation- and I have a nice project in mind!

Italian Cats

This week we read Papa Piccolo, a story about a Venetian cat who finds 2 kittens and adopts them. There were plenty of opportunities for learning.

 

 But one morning, we got a very late start to the day and decided to have school in the afternoon. That left time for a fort.

     First we learned about Italy and painted the flag. Next we looked at Google Earth images of our house and then Venice- so cool!  The girls know there are satellites in the sky so they were excited to see real aerial photos taken of a place so far away. We also looked at photos from when Dax and I went to Venice. They loved seeing us in the same places as the book.

We acted out several descriptive verbs like sneak and pounce and creep

that described Piccolo's adventurous life on the canals.

 Colin gets plenty of time to play with little sets like these when the girls are doing spelling. He loves to sort colors right now.

 This day we learned about art and music in Italy. We listened to Mendelssohn's Italian Symphony and Carnival of Venice.  We also watched a little video about Michelangelo and the kids got a chance to "paint" on a ceiling after looking at the Sistine Chapel online. They used markers and taped coloring sheets for a little easier cleanup : )
 

                                       Colin was so interested he went back for more.

 We also learned about drawing cats. I saw an illustrator once say that as long as you stick to the defining features of an animal, the shape of it's head or body doesn't matter, although rounder shapes are more appealing to children and angular shapes seem more villainous. So we drew three different kinds of cats and also make paper sack cat puppets.

                           I love that I came back later and Hannah had added the rest.

 On another day, we read all about the habits of cats and they got to play cat for the morning, having lunch on little floor mats.

                                               Hannah traced over some canals on a map.

 We sent our friend Heather some interview questions. She has two cats and was really sweet to answer all of our questions- from how they act to where they sleep. We wrote it out, stapled them all together, and glued them in the scrapbook.

                                                    We had fun making a cat diagram.

 This was a little picture I made for Chloe who is easily discouraged when she is not able to read the words we are working on. I saw her pouting in the corner and showed her how a happy attitude will eventually lead to success because she'll keep trying. And being upset will never lead to right answers. She seemed to like that and took the sheet with her. I saw her try to read her word, almost pout, and then look at the sheet and try again. : )

      We had school at the library one day and Colin played with Battleship pieces happily by the study room window.

 

On this day, we read Big Momma Cat's Clock, which described the daily schedule of one housecat. They thought it was funny every time she took a nap because of course it was quite often. We came up with our own daily schedules and I encouraged them to put down anything they wanted- it's their dream day! Once they got past breakfast, they thought outside the box a little bit (except for Colin, who wanted to do "nuffing" ). Chloe also put laundry on her list which is funny. But the best is when Hannah said she wanted to have an adventure in the forest. I asked her what kind and she said matter of factly, "fox hunting."  No idea where that came from. She did her best spelling all her activities while I helped Chloe. After fox hunting she went to the mall, bought a Christmas tree, decorated it with ornaments, and had mac and cheese for dinner. :)

 

 We read Madeline and the Cats of Rome about a little girl protecting a group of homeless cats. I remember hearing about the cat issue on the radio one day myself. At one point, the cats are in the dark with their eyes glowing. The girls also noticed their pupils are vertical, so we tested our own pupils in a dark room and then a lit room to see how they change size...but don't glow. At the end of the book, the cats are adopted out to people all over the world, so it was fun to find those cities on our big world map.

 They also tried walking along a narrow surface like a cat. This was a favorite.

 Our field trip this week was to an animal shelter. Since two of our books dealt with animals needing homes, this seemed like a great place to go. The kids weren't old enough to really volunteer, so we took a tour of 2 shelters and offered to donate supplies in the future. I'm going to admit that although I have sworn up and down we would NOT be getting a dog until the kids are much older, part of me hoped we would come across "the one." In fact, the second shelter we visited the next day because I suddenly wasn't willing to give up on the idea. Crazy me. I saw several sweet dogs online and we visited with 3 of them in person. However, the kids were mostly concerned with the yapping and barking hurting their ears. The 3 we saw were very quiet and what we would be looking for, but even though the kids pet them and were kind, they weren't that enamored and were ready to go pretty soon. Even the dogs were more content to sniff around the room rather than pay attention to the kids. So thankfully it confirmed that it's quite okay to wait awhile for a new family member. In the meantime I started thinking "fish!" And that may still be a possibility but I was researching filters and lights and got overwhelmed pretty quickly and had to quit- haha

This week we get into some construction!

The Rag Coat and Changes in Plans

For our first week back, we read The Rag Coat. Looking back, maybe it was a little too low key for the first week. It's a nice book with a great message, but it's kind of like starting a concert with a slow, lyrical piece instead of a fanfare. I like to think in musical terms : )

 First we learned about the geography from the story- the Appalachian Mountains. The kids decorated the area on a map.

The little girl's father dies from lung disease since he was a coal miner, so we read Growing Up in Coal Country. Well, I read it beforehand since I found it completely fascinating and then I shared some of the facts and pictures with them. Teaching them about different ways of life is wonderful, but it often shows how good they really have it. They can't comprehend this since they've never known hardship. Who knows what the future will bring, but I pray they will always have at least the things they need, and most of all faith to stick with God no matter what.
 
Now here's where I got off track a little. Originally, I had planned to have them make a simple quilt this week- we've also recently read the Quiltmaker books. We checked out a book about prairie quilts for children and my intent was to let them pick a design and understand that each quilt block had a meaning behind it. They were completely uninterested in the blocks and just wanted to make a quilt. Once we gathered our material, they decided to go their own direction and draw out their own designs. I didn't want to discourage them so I let them go ahead. Well guidance turned out to be more necessary than their freedom to explore. In fact, it was a mess. And they weren't so able to learn to measure and cut even the simplest pieces. Just too many steps for this project at their age. So I regrouped that evening and was careful not to beat myself up- not everything is going to be perfect and that's why this is all a good experience for me, too.

Switching gears, several bloggers had done this, so we followed it, too. The kids cut up scrap paper and decorated their own rag coat. The book also mentions Joseph and his many-colored coat and that happened to line up with our Bible stories.

On music day, we had some fun. Dax grew up in East Tennessee, and I went to school there with him, so we have some ties to the region and it's music. After some searching, I discovered that Dolly Parton had actually performed a song (on YouTube) about the girl with the rag coat. It turns out the book was written in response to that song! What a great thing for the kids to watch. We promised them they'd get to Dollywood sometime in their lives since so many relatives live near there. Chloe especially like Dolly. Then of course we had to dance to our school's song- Rocky Top!! 

 On Thursday, we headed to the library for school time. They have some awesome study rooms with lots of windows and we had to get there early to grab one of them. While we waited, Chloe and Colin introduced themselves to another patron, Betty. They cheer up people wherever they go, those two. Hannah tends to hang back with me, but the younger ones are eager to share names, ages, and life stories.

                              We set up shop. Colin was entertained by DinoCheckers for awhile : )

 After spelling time, I decided the basics of quilt making could still be addressed as part of math, so the girls learned to draw exact squares on graph paper, both tracing and using a ruler.

                                     Then they worked with tangram shapes for awhile.

                                                            Hannah's tangram girl.

 On Friday, we read two other stories about quilts. One was The Keeping Quilt about a Jewish immigrant family who passed it down through generations of weddings and births. The other was Under the Quilt of Night about the slaves on the Underground Railroad who spotted particular quilts hung out on fences showing them safe havens on their way to freedom. The kids really liked that one and the artwork was beautiful. It's amazing that one piece of sewn cloth can represent so many facets of American culture and history.

To include some more experiential aspects of the book, we did a little coal-mining reenactment.
We did not have a construction helmet, nor a flashlight that worked. :/ So they used a knight's helmet and an iphone. Talk about mixing cultures. They each headed down a tunnel into the master closet, where I closed them in the dark.

 Their job was to use their tiny light to find 8 pieces of coal (black magnetic rocks) in the bucket and then crawl back out.

                            The blue gravel rubbed off, so I guess that was the realistic part. : )

They also received all sorts of materials to create their own rag doll like the girl in the book.
I tried to stay out of the picture to see what they came up with and both ended up choosing buttons and markers.

Not so much the more traditional result I expected, but hey, they adore these dolls and have been playing with them nonstop- and isn't that the point? : )

My favorite quote from one of my favorite movies "You've Got Mail" : ) is... "So much of what I see reminds me of something I read in a book, when shouldn't it be the other way around?"  I want that to be true in life so much. The way we can begin at school is to try and make aspects of a book come alive in hopes that some day we'll begin to turn it around and create stories of our own.

Our field trip for the week was to visit a quilt shop, but I was suddenly uninspired by that. We already have a few quilts at home and I was probably going to spend most of the time saying "don't touch!"  I had the urge to make our field trip a lot bigger- and was feeling kind of measly after the whole knight's helmet, closet experiment even though they had fun. I found out that Inner Space Cavern was the closest cave to us- about 3 hours away. I texted Dax at work and asked if he'd be willing to leave for Austin as soon as he got home. Good-natured Dax wrote back, "sure." The kids were extremely excited to stay in a hotel that night. You should have heard the squeals and screams and endless questions. For their first time altogether, they did great and hardly had any trouble going to bed. (And I got a nice long bath with a book).

The next morning the kids were super excited to go underground like the miners. Chloe kept asking if there was going to be lava and wouldn't be convinced we weren't deep enough for that. Hannah was excited to walk by herself and be independent. Colin was very good, too, but was mostly concerned about his shoes getting muddy : )

                                                 100 years per cubic inch of stalactite.

                                             Do you see a sumo wrestler eating ice cream?

 This is the room where the cave was first discovered. Folks checking the ground before the construction of I35 drilled into this space. They lowered a worker down on a drill bit, who saw the large rock next to him and yelled for help thinking it was a bear. Honestly, the tour guide was so full of corny jokes, it was hard to tell fact from fiction most of the time.

                I'm happy this turned out to be a successful last minute idea.  My family explored several caves growing up and I've always felt really happy and at peace down there. Maybe I need to take up some real spelunking.