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!