Encouraging a reluctant reader.

My youngest son is not a very good reader yet. I've been looking for a way to make it fun and I've found it!



So far, this is great. This is the most enthusiasm about reading that my son has ever shown!

Art

My 2 younger kids are doing art studies in symmetry today. What I mean by that is that they are painting on one half of a paper and folding it over to get some really cool symmetrical paintings. Apparently this is endlessly facinating. My daughter did one in dark green and yellow that looked kind of like a head of lettuce. My younger son said "That looks like a mutated lettuce leaf." About one of her other paintings, he pronounced that it looked like a ladybug. She said haughtily, "Some people just don't know art!" Then he joined in the painting process, making his own paintings with an idea of selling them for 25 cents each (maybe grandma will buy one!). He had only 2 completed and my daugher had done 13. He said to her "You have more but I have better!" Never a dull moment here.

Blame it on ...

Last night the kids and I were at my parent's house. My youngest had rediscovered the Mega Blocks and was building towers about 5 feet tall with them. One of the towers fell over and made a great deal of noise on the hardwood floors. I asked him not to do it again but sure enough, a few minutes later, I heard another crash. I looked at him and he said "I didn't do it this time - gravity just did it on its own."

Tagged! (Kind of)

Four jobs I've had:
Head Start Teacher, Caseworker, Phone answerer, Medical Transcriptionist.

Four movies I can watch over and over:
While You Were Sleeping, Seredipity, Home Alone, The Princess Bride.


Four places that I've lived:
My parent's house, college dorm (Eastern Kentucky University), mobile home when first married, current house.

Four TV shows that I like:
Medium, The Apprentice, Trading Spaces, Flip That House. I also like everything on HGTV.

Four places I've vacationed:
Gatlinburg, Cincinnati, Indianapolis, Cave City.

Four of my favorite dishes:
Mashed potatoes, Cream of broccoli soup, anything mexican, anything chocolate.

Four sites I visit daily:
MT Daily, Blogspot, My.Yahoo and various curriculum sites.

Four places I would rather be right now:
In a house with at least 4 bedrooms and a basement and cable internet, in the HGTV dream house I've just won (I wish), on vacation someplace warm and China.


Four bloggers I am tagging:

1. You

2. You

3. You

4. And You !


If you have as much fun being "It" as I do, please play along, and let me know you did, okay ?

Our Mixed Up Unit Study.

We're still reading Mr. Popper's Penguins. Because of circumstances with getting materials from the library and from Amazon, etc. we seem to be studying all of the determination subunits at the same time. The subunits in the determination unit are arctic/antarctic expeditions (I added some about the Iditarod), handicaps, great feats/buildings/bridges and the Olympic games. We started with the Olympics, thinking we'd do a review when the actual games came up. We seem to move right on through the KONOS units a bit quickly, doing them for a month to 6 weeks instead of 9 weeks. So Friday we were building bridges. We went to the library on Saturday to get some more books on building bridges and other great buildings and found that our movies had finally come in: Iron Will (about a dog sled race) and The Endurance, about Shackleton's adventure in the antartic. Next week, the Olympics come on TV and I'm trying to figure how to get an Olympic sized housecleaning effort going on at the same time, maybe clean by day and watch the Olympics at night?

Here's Mr. Popper's Penguins.


And here are some links to on-line free unit studies about it.

Mr Popper's Penguins

Of course, since we're doing so many different things at once in our mixed up unit study, we're also reading
Alone Across the Arctic, which is very good.


There is a lot of information in this book too.

Iditarod Links

Anyone who knows me would expect me to teach units this way, I suppose. All mixed up and kind of crazy, but fun.

My Driving.

Tonight my older son said that he always thought he would be afraid of roller coasters, but it couldn't be worse than my driving. Thanks a lot bud. Three years and I'll be his backseat driver! Maybe 4 or 5 years.

Bath Wars

My kids are currently inventing a story that they call Bath Wars - Revenge of the Rubber Ducky. It involves 'the suds' as the force, "soap sabers", "dirty one kinobi", "puke skywalker" and "darth sponge". My daughter keeps saying mysteriously, "Use the suds! Use the suds!" Don't tell me these kids don't have imagination!

Unrelated Musings.

I haven't been in the mood to blog this week. I've been here but just haven't been in the mood. I don't know why. We've been using the block schedule all week and it has been going pretty well. With the block schedule, we finally got started on the Spanish we've been meaning to start on since October. Now the 2 younger kids are running around calling everyone in the house senor, senora or senorita, including the dogs and cats.

We have still been studying determination which is a unit that includes a lot of interesting, seemingly unrelated, things. The only thing that they share is the fact that they took determination to accomplish. One of the assignments in our book is that we should do something that will take determination to accomplish. My older son and I discussed that since he makes walking sticks, he should make a really good one, complete with carvings, polyurethane and a leather thong (meaning the leather strap you hang it up by) etc.

My younger son came into the middle of this conversation, only hearing me tell my older son that I could get him a leather thong at Wal-mart and you should have seen his face. It was hilarious. I guess from now on, I'll be calling them a leather strap.

I guess that's all the news from here for today. I noticed that a couple of my earlier posts this week had the day as the title, as in "Monday" and I thought (sarcastically), I bet everyone is thankful for me telling them what day it is--so I won't do that today!