Doctor Who is very cool
with adventures and danger, too.
There are daleks and cybermen – boo!
Doctor who had sonic sticks
And one big Tardis and monsters, too.
I love it all
And you do, too.
And we all will love Doctor Who.
C is on the last part of the last book of Harry Potter. He’s reading about Snape’s memories right now (and with wide eyes exclaimed to me his astonishment, after books of believing a certain thing about a certain character and discovering THE TRUTH!) I’m on standby, sitting close as he reads because this morning I was greeted by him listing the deaths of characters he loves and I know it only gets worse from here. 🙁
I love that he loves reading this much.
Update: C has finished reading the entire series! And he handled the climax much better than we anticipated, for which I’m grateful.
Here’s the explanation and here are the reading lists for K through 3rd and 4th through 6th.
Read:
Goodnight Moon
The Story of Babar
Mike Mulligan
Strega Nona
Corduroy
Ferdinand
Frederick
Anasasi
Where the Wild Things Are
Sylvester & The Magic Pebble
Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible
Cat in Hat
Reading:
Aesop’s Fables
Frog & Toad are Friends (re-read)
The Tale of Peter the Rabbit (re)
Child’s Garden of Verse
Mr. Popper’s Penguins (re)
After 10 days of reading (or being read to) for 20 minutes a day we turned in our logs and got our first price – a book! Mom had the final veto power so we got a mix of what I felt I didn’t mind having in the house. 🙂 And everyone gets a book, babies through grown ups.
A dragon book, the Complete Idiot’s Guide to Harry Potter (covers all seven books) and an Encyclopedia Brown:
Magic Schoolbus, Whacky Atlas, Diary of a Worm:
She was swaying back and forth with excitement, it’s fuzzed! A fairy tale compilation and a Pinkalicious easy reader for the big girls to share:
So go sign up for the summer reading program! Most years for the second set of 10 days the kids get a coupon for a local restaurant, like Coldstone or this last year it was Jason’s Deli (and we JUST last week let B use up his coupon for a solo date with Kit.) This year they have by age things like a bip, “mood cup”, pencils, etc. The third set of 10 days gets them a pass to the library waterpark night.
This week we read the Lamb’s version of “Much Ado About Nothing” and we are now viewing the DVD (which I’m editing due to the window scene.) The funny thing is that the Lamb version mentions Hero’s maid talking to a man at the window (upsetting Claudio and setting off the cascade of misunderstanding) but I’ve not read the play! I had only seen the movie so I wondered if “talking” was the Lamb’s code word for what the movie depicted (which was NOT talking.) (Did you read the play? Was the maid talking or more?) Having not seen the movie in years I’m screening ahead to verify the rest is safe and we’ll skip the “talking” scene but I’m surprised at how much the kids are enjoying it, even though it’s Shakespeare speak.
And Christopher’s taught me a lesson – I told him after he finishes each Harry Potter book he can watch the film. I thought that would buy me time, maybe until he was 13 and old enough to watch the later ones?? Ha, ha. He’s working through book seven right now, I read it again this last week to remember the story so I could answer questions and to brace for tragedy. He had anticipated someone’s death in the last book (I’ll be vague in case y’all haven’t read it) and seemed to handle that well, but he was pretty upset by the loss of a pet in this one. I can never predict these kids! So we watched the sixth movie together and put the seventh (part one) on hold at the library. We’re #53 in line or something crazy, so we’ll get to watch it probably sometime this year? 🙂
He’s patched, which means he’s trying to read this book with one eye that sees 20/150. I told him to get a chapter book to start, he picked The Lightening Thief and I had some hesitations but I decided to let him go for it. He’s only on page one but I am so, so proud of him for trying to read (a) patched (b) a book that’s pretty advanced for a six year old. 😀
C has completed the First Language Lessons for the Well Trained Mind level 4:
So we’re making some big changes to his language lessons. On Mondays he picks a memorization piece (right now that’s Articles of Faith but it can be a song, poem, scripture, etc.) At some point during the week he has to write out the piece he’s memorizing and on Friday I check to see how he’s doing. He practices it throughout the week.
On Tuesdays he gets his new spelling words, which are getting more challenging but he still rarely gets any wrong so I don’t make him do enrichment for spelling.
On one of the days (he picks – M,T or W) he reads a biography and does a note outline (main topic, three interesting points about the person.)
On the other days I let him pick – journal entry, report on what he’s reading for fun (currently Harry Potter book six), or pretty much any sort of reading/writing of his choosing.
On Thursdays he narrates for me the literature reading (Shakespeare for kids right now) and does a story chart – characters, plot, theme, setting, etc) with all of the kids.
On Fridays he also narrates for me the history reading, does his memorization test, and has a spelling test.
Eventually he’ll do an oral narration, written outline and then formal paragraph for the various reports & readings but we’re working slowly towards that. Since he’s only nine I think one written report a week is enough. 🙂
I put several books on hold at the library to see what our options were for reading The Odyssey and The Iliad. One was this graphic novel and Christopher says it’s okay, but it’s not all in order and it’s missing a lot of stuff. Since we’ve not read them yet I was confused and asked how he knows they got details wrong? And C said because he’s studied greek mythology. That made me laugh, but he does know far more mythology than I do! So we’ll look through a couple other options, too, and see if C approves of those.
We just finished reading Sadako and the Thousand Paper Cranes and it’s one to explore for sure. It’s the true story of a young girl that survives the bombing of Hiroshima but later dies from leukemia caused by the exposure. It’s geared toward older elementary age but it had even Bennett entranced and the kids kept asking me to read another chapter until the book was finished. They paused me a few times to ask questions, wondering if it was a true story and if she died and who dropped the bomb. It will certainly bring up some tough questions about war and the role America played, along with questions about cancer and death, but it’s well written without being overwhelming for kids. It may overwhelm the adult attempting to explain things. 🙂 This was also significant for us because my paternal grandfather died from leukemia after time spent in Japan while American forces were there during/after the war. His widow receives VA benefits because they said the exposure was the cause of his leukemia, even decades later.
Really good book, and at the end it has directions for children to fold their own paper cranes.
Update: with the current situation in Japan after the earthquake and tsunami I found this CNN article about a classmate of Sadako’s! She became an oncologist in part because of her experience with the effects of radiation on her classmate – good article.
ABCs of Yoga for Kids is a huge hit:
I used our Scholastic Bonus Points to get it, though I think it was $1 normal price. 🙂 There are 2 to 4 poses per letter of the alphabet with a little story time explanation (just a rhyme or some such saying) and the kids are LOVING it. The images are simple enough that pre-readers can figure out the pose but you can also read it to them and demonstrate. I’m doing it with them and it’s a good yoga stretch work out! Fun find…
Update: This is a huge, huge hit. I keep finding E going through it to find new poses and then showing them to Kit and the other kids. She loves it, as do the other kids. This evening we did a dozen or so poses together before bed. I flipped through and wrote up a list of the poses by type: standing, sitting/kneeling, all fours, laying down. I wrote out the lists in the front cover so we can do them more easily in groupings – the standing poses flow nicely into each other, for example. It’s really a great stretch! And the nicknames are sticking in the kids’ memories, I can say flower pose and they do it right away.
