January Review and February Goals

January was a busy and peaceful month in our house. It was not entirely easy to get back into routine after December vacations, but we eventually found our groove. We did quite well in “time outside” part of my plan for 2011. The weather was beautiful, and we tried to spend some time outside every day. Anna is becoming quite a biker, and I hope that her training wheels will come off soon. I give myself solid A here.

It’s tempting to approach "organization” as one major spurt, but my husband and I decided to take more pragmatic approach this year. Every week we spend one evening on one organization project. It’s good to work together and discuss where things are going, what to keep and what to toss. It’s also exciting to see some free space on our shelves and in our minds. B+ grade, because maybe we could have done a bit more, and I still have a big mess on my desk.

We are still working on establishing traditions. Our daughter loves structure and knowing what to expect and she doesn’t react well when we have to reschedule things that were promised to her due to unexpected events or simply due to being tired. I definitely sense the need for more play that is directed by her, but I have also been thinking that she needs to learn to help more and to appreciate the fact that parents need some down time as well. B for effort :)
I started the year well with my exercise goals, but slipped in the second half of the month. I do have an excuse – I exercise in the living room, and my parents are using it now. I try to walk around more while talking on conference calls and to stretch. Also, my work coffee buddy and best friend at work has quit, so I cut down on my morning coffee runs from every day to about 2 times a week. One of these times I meet my former coffee buddy outside and go for a long walk with her. I lost one pound in January, so I give myself B-.
In February I want to focus more on free play and resurrect our “learning boxes”. I let them stagnate, and Anna lost interest in them. I want to continue spending time outside, plant a small vegetable garden and have happy times with my family. Let’s hope that we won’t have any unexpected curve balls that will throw these plans off.
I am linking this post to Monthly Goals hosted by Mama Smiles.

What My Child Is Reading – January 29, 2011

The winners of the week were pretty clear this time. Here they are:

We listened to the audio recording of Catwings by Ursula K. Le Guin (read by author) about a month ago, and I finally got an audio book of a sequel – Catwings Return. This audio book came in a package with an actual book, and Anna loved being able to follow along. She also read a book separately and listened to the recording too many times to count. She is in love with this book and constantly acts out the scenes from it – her ability to quote long paragraphs by heart amazes me. The story itself is lovely and less intense than the first book, and I think that 4+ crowd will love these series.

My Town by Rebecca Treays was recommended last week by One Little Room, and, as most Usborne books, became an instant hit. To be honest, I only got to look through it briefly before Anna snatched it, but I knew that she will like it. It has a simple non-fiction story, flaps and a lot of definitions – everything that she enjoys in non-fiction books. I liked that the book also has maps and shows how the town changed and grew over time.

Since daughter is currently obsessed with space travel, she enjoyed Living in Space book from DK Eyewitness Readers series. It’s one of those books where Level 2 is somewhat misleading, since vocabulary of the book was somewhat challenging even for my fluent reader (she has problems sounding out long words that she cannot decode from the context). I read this book together with her to make sure she doesn’t skip those long words, and then she was pouring over it on her own.

Anna read Rescue Bunnies by Doreen Cronin a couple times and then brought it to me and started asking questions. The book fascinated her enough to start playing the story pretending to be a Newbie and rescuing a giraffe. One interesting thing about this book is that it had random quotes from Tom Cruise movies sprinkled through it, and Anna asked me about every single one. Try to explain “Truth? You can’t handle the truth!” to a 4 year old. I think it’s not an easy book for read-aloud, but illustrations are really engaging.

What are your children reading? Please link up and share – linky is open all week.

Week In Review – January 28, 2011

This week has started with big battles between daughter testing every rule and parents trying to reinforce them. Parents won, and by Monday life has returned to normal. Anna’s theme in school was Rainforest. I wish they had better books and crafts, because she keeps telling me that giraffes and lions are rainforest animals. At home we continued with space, learned quite a bit about space travel, moon rovers, shuttles and space stations and built a lot of them from Lego. On Tuesday night my parents came for a visit. They will stay with us for almost 2 weeks, and, of course, Anna is over the top excited – she loves her Babushka and Dedushka.

Math. We didn’t do much for math this week except referring to various Lego pieces as 2x2, 2x3 or 4x1 and playing a money game here. I didn’t care much for the game since it allowed too much guessing and one part was too long. She also pulled out her Miniluk and Miniluk books and played with them for a while. Miniluk is a great system to encourage attention, number recognition and logic.

Science. We continued to learn about space, spacecrafts and moon rovers by reading a few books and watching The Big Space Shuttle. Anna learned a lot about shuttle missions and what astronauts do. However, she thought that it’s much more interesting to be “a nice alien from Pluto” – she put a deflated ball on her head to create her alien outfit.

Nature. While most of the country is blanketed by snow, we are having our typical late January weather – it’s warm enough to wear short sleeves during the day. Every January we go to a certain hiking place – this year was the first time Anna hiked all 3 miles or though on her own. Usually the place has a lot of California poppies, but it has been a cold winter, and only one brave bush popped out so far. We saw a lot of egrets up close – they are so graceful. I just wish Anna wasn’t whining so much – she kept saying that she would rather play at home. We definitely need to get back to more field trips, so she can build up her strength and get used to hiking.

Space Travel and Space Collage

We read new books about space this week and some of our favorites from the past couple of weeks. The focus of new books was on astronauts and space vehicles, and I also learned some new facts from Floating in Space. Anna’s favorite line of the book was “Mealtime in space is often playtime”. She was happy to tell papa that astronauts are allowed to play with their food. I was  fascinated to learn that astronauts grow 1-2 inches taller while in space and then lose those inches gradually with return to gravity.  All three of us enjoyed the movie that I brought from the library called The Big Space Shuttle. It was made in 2003 shortly before the tragic last flight of Columbia shuttle. There is a reference in the movie about lost shuttles, but otherwise it’s a fascinating peek into NASA shuttle program. Anna really enjoyed it, but she already got some introduction to vocabulary and concepts from the books and discussions that we had before. We also talked about Russian space program – after all, it was the former Soviet Union that had first sent a man into space, and I wanted her to know Yuri Gagarin’s name as well as she knows Neil Armstrong’s (OK, she keeps calling him Neil Amsterdam, but still).

Anna kept playing with her Lego space ships and building more of them. She also colored and cut several coloring pages, so eventually we could put together the space collage. Knowing her love for color mixing while painting I only gave her three colors for  her collage – purple, light blue and dark blue. She put together her collage the next day since her painting took forever to dry. Clearly she couldn’t quit while she was ahead and decided to add “tic-tac-toe in space” to it. The planet on the top is Pluto, and she told me that she thinks that “Pluto is a king of all planets because it’s so small”. Logic of a 4 year old… I want to frame this collage, but Anna keeps saying that she is not done with it yet. I think it would be nice to add an astronaut playing that tic-tac-toe.

I am linking this post to StArt hosted by A Mommy’s Adventures and to Kids Get Crafty hosted by Red Ted’s Art.

How Crayons Are Made

I have stumbled upon “Start to Finish” series of books while looking for something on Amazon. We already had a batch of broken crayons that I was collecting for the “melting experiment”, so I thought that From Wax to Crayon book will be a good companion for this activity. First I asked Anna to predict what will happen if we put crayons in the oven. She predicted that they will burn, we will have to call the fire department and papa will not be happy. Then I had her peel and break the crayons into pieces – her favorite part of experiment. Unfortunately, I really messed up on the setup – I didn’t think that crayons will liquefy so completely and so quickly. Putting them into the cookie cutters was not a good idea. We ended up with a big colorful puddle that spread all over foil and eventually cooled into thin and fragile crayon strips. Still, Anna was thrilled with this experiment and happy to try her new “crayon strips”. We will definitely repeat this experiment using molds. As for the book, it was somewhat disappointing. Quality of the photos could have been better, and sometimes the text didn’t quite match the picture. Still, Anna studied it with great interest and added “crayon making” to her list of future careers. She said that she might invent a new crayon and then she will send me the box. So nice of her :)

I am linking this post to Science Sunday at Adventures in Mommydom.

What My Child Is Reading – January 22, 2011

Our reading this week has been “eclectic” – I let Anna select most of her library books and usually she looks at “New Arrivals” shelf first and picks a few books. Then she goes to “I Can Read” shelves and loads up on anything from basic Biscuit books to Level 3 readers and chapter books. How she makes her picks are beyond me, I usually add books to this review based on how often she asks questions about the content, how often I find the book in her bed, and how long she wants to keep the library book home (I only let her keep 10 books between library visits). Two books that lead “stay-at-home” list are Postcards from Pluto and Over in the Arctic, but I already wrote about both of them. Here are some other highlights.

My Family Plays Music by Judy Cox was very fascinating to Anna who doesn’t have a large and musically gifted family. It was also chock-full of new vocabulary – various types of music, musical instruments, etc. The main character introduces different members of her family, describes what instruments they play and where, and she always plays something herself. In fact, this book made me want to have a “music instruments” theme sometimes in February.

My Very First Encyclopedia of Animals published by Disney was a gift from my parents about a year ago or maybe even longer ago. It was gathering dust on the shelf, but suddenly Anna is all over it for the past several weeks. From time to time she treats me to a random fact from the book (who knew that seahorses can hook their tails together?) and discusses the differences between mammals and lizards. I like how the book is set up – it gives some basic facts about the animals and their habitats and the photos are really nice too. I just requested the other book in these series (Nature) from Paperbackswap.

I read The Eensy Weensy Spider Freaks Out by Toy Cummings once with Anna and didn’t care for it. However, she informed me that she “loves everything” about this book and wants to keep it for longer, so it made me think again why she might like it (except the title, that is). Then I started appreciating the message of the book – overcoming your fears by starting small and learning to go higher and higher. So even though it wouldn’t be on my list of top books I still recommend it.

I got this Hello Out There book from Magic School Bus series on the library book sale, and all stickers were still intact. They definitely provided additional “fun factor” for the book, and Anna read it several times on her own. We also watched the episode this book is loosely based on – Magic School Bus Gets Lost in Space, and she declared both the book and the episode “too scary”. But it was a good way to add some “social skills” knowledge in addition to her planet knowledge – why bragging is obnoxious and irritates people.

What are your children reading? Link up and share – linky is open all week.

Week In Review – Jan 21, 2011

Anna is 4 years 3 months old. We are enjoying better weather and shorter work week this week. Unfortunately, Anna was sniffling this weekend and at some point has lost her voice completely, so we were mostly hanging out at home. She was not happy to miss another birthday party she was invited to, but was somewhat consoled when she could still give a present to her friend and receive a party favor in return. The teachers in school are telling us that she loves to make other kids laugh and pretty good at telling stories. She told me that she is making up stories in her head when she goes to bed but didn’t want to share any – “it’s a secret, mommy”.

Math. We are still doing some math worksheets, but we are trying to focus more on “thinking math” – figuring out answers from the verbal clues, logical reasoning and sequencing. We also did more work on symmetry by folding more paper and cutting space aliens and space ships. I don’t put a lot of emphasis on “math facts” – I will leave that to her kindergarten teacher next year :)

Science. It was the Solar System week in the house. Anna is very fascinated with this topic. She created a solar system out of homemade playdoh, and read many books about space and planets. She also played through a planet mission on the computer where she enjoyed putting planets in order and answering quiz questions about them. Now she added “astronaut” to the list of her future careers.

Arts and Crafts. The weather was warm enough to take crafting outside a couple of times. We were making some “mini-crafts” in small doses for the big space collage – they all involved cutting, drawing, coloring and decorating assorted aliens and spacecrafts. I hope to reveal the completed project next week. Her independent projects also involved some cutting and gluing – a step forward from cutting everything into “a salad”.

Play. The “toy of the week” was definitely Lego, especially when papa was joining in building spaceships too. We also tried two new games this week – Connect 4 and Crazy 8s. Crazy 8s was an instant hit – daughter definitely prefers games of chance to strategy games at this point. I wish we had one more player for Apples to Apples Jr – Anna likes the game a lot, but it’s just not as much fun with three people.

Our Latest Lego Creations

We all love Lego in the house. Our Duplo bricks collection is sizeable, but it pales in comparison to our Lego blocks. Most of them belonged to my husband and his brother – some pieces are more than 30 years old. This is the beauty of Lego – a true classic toy that will last for generations of kids. I find it very exciting that Anna loves to play with Legos. I guess I dream that one day she will learn to design and build really complex things like her father, a true Lego Master. Both of them were busy building spaceships out of basic blogs this week. My husband built a beautiful space shuttle with the opening cabin for one person crew and with a cargo hold that opens and closes. In the meantime Anna was building up a storm of various “spaceships” that she was hooking together into a space station. She was particularly proud of this one that looks more like a plane. It has wings, tail, engine and even seating area for three “astronauts”. It was so much fun to see her pride in her work and true excitement of creating something entirely out of her own mind. But she is also interested in putting together Lego sets that come with instructions. We didn’t have any space sets, but she got this Lego Pirate set for her birthday and finally expressed desire to put it together. Even though I’d rather have her build her own projects, there are some advantages in assembling these sets – she can build more complex projects and learn to read assembly instructions. I still had to help her by providing “brute force” – sometimes it’s hard for her to align and snap small pieces together, but she is doing really great understanding the instructions – it seems she did inherit some of her father’s abilities here.

I am linking this post to We Play hosted by Childhood 101 and to Play Academy hosted by Nurture Store.

Two Announcements

1. Check out Dollar Deals at Scholastic Teacher Express. There are great eBooks vailable at a very reasonable price (and you can pay via PayPal).

2. Time to announce the winners of my Pay It Forward Giveaway:

• #3 Kim said... ooh, I want to play!So many great things I could send from Hawaii!
• #4 Kim Monaco said... I'd love to play! Sounds like a fun idea.
• #2 Mom and Kiddo said... This sounds like fun. I'm not normally one for this kind of thing, but what the heck.

I hope the winners can send me their addresses via email :)

The Solar System in Playdoh

As always, the major part of any “theme” in our house are books. There are many wonderful books about space, and we just barely “scratched the surface”. So far Anna has been mostly interested in the Solar system and its planets. Postcards from Pluto was the most informative, since it gave some interesting details about each planet. I am excited about this space theme, since my own dream job when I was a child was to become a space doctor. When I became a teenager, I got interested in chemistry and dreamed of being the next Marie Curie. So for the “space project” I combined my own passions of chemistry and space – we were making planets out of homemade playdoh.

Anna was very enthusiastic about every part of this project. It turns out that she “always wanted to make playdoh, because it was in my magazine”. Then she was very busy making her planets and trying to scale them. She was really trying to make sure that her Sun would be bigger than her Jupiter. Jupiter had to have a Great Spot, but she chose to make it blue. It was interesting to listen to her stories and see just how much she absorbed from her readings. I was sad that we had to disassemble her solar system, but she can always make it again another day.

I am linking this post to Science Sunday hosted by Adventures in Mommydom, Kids Get Crafty hosted by Red Ted’s Art Blog and to StArt hosted by A Mommy’s Adventures.

What My Child Is Reading – January 16, 2010

This week we were transitioning our theme reading from Arctic to space books with some “random picks” thrown in between. We had a lot of winners in all categories:

Polar Bears Past Bedtime from Magic Tree House finally straggled in from the library order and became a chapter book of the week. I got Anna started by reading the first two chapters to her, then she read it herself. But I was also interested in discussing it further, so I was reading it to her in the evenings one more time. By now Anna kind of believes that no harm will ever come to Jack and Annie, so she is more interested in the series. The book was also a nice wrap-up of our arctic theme.

Postcards from Pluto by Loreen Leedy begs to be used for art extension project. Even though the book is better suited for older kids, Anna read it many times in bed and learned a lot of interesting tidbits from this book (like the fact that Uranus kind of lies on its side in relation to sun). The postcards themselves are written by space-traveling kids and have a lot of word play gags in addresses. This part of course was not noticed by Anna, but I found it very entertaining.

On the Town by Judith Caseley is perfect to learn/reinforce knowledge of community helpers. Again, the book begs to be used for an extension project, and Anna even started one but ran out of steam rather quickly. The boy in the book visits different places in the community and learns about different jobs that people do. The list of places is pretty comprehensive, and the illustrations are great. The only thing that I didn’t like is that mother constantly praised the boy for his intelligence – I couldn’t tell whether she is serious or joking, but it seemed like an overkill in the book for young kids.

After reading Hunter and Stripe and the Soccer Shutdown we picked up Hunter’s Best Friend at School by Laura Malone Elliott and Lynn Munsinger. It’s another book that teaches good behavior without being too didactic about it. What do we do when our friends lead us into trouble? Do we follow along or can we help them be their best selves instead. I hope Anna can remember these ideas when she is faced with the situation like this, but so far she has been famous in school for “correcting” her friends behavior so much that she is told by her teacher “to worry about herself” instead.

What are your children reading this week? Link up and share – linky is open all week.

Week In Review – January 14, 2010

Anna is 4 years 2 months old. We are slowly getting back into routine here. Kindergarten registration opened on Monday, and I dropped off Anna’s package. It turned out that now TB test is also required for all students, so papa had to take her in for that test and for her flu shot booster. She was not amused with extra needles. It’s strange to think that this year my little girl will go to the big school, but she now enjoys her preschool days, especially since she is allowed to read during nap times. Her theme in preschool was Construction, and at home we wrapped up Arctic and zoomed off into space. The picture on the left is from a fun birthday party that she attended this past weekend. I call it “two monkeys”.

K Prep. Anna’s favorite game to play on my iPod is Teach Kindergarten. Her previous favorite was Feed Me Monster (free), but she got to the end of it. She doesn’t get to play on my iPod often, but it’s a nice way to unwind after a long day (for both of us), and she doesn’t have to write anything – it’s still her least favorite of all school activities.

Arts and Crafts. I love it when Anna is interested in drawing or crafting. One of her favorite things to do is to make “accessories” for her paper dolls. Usually this means drawing, cutting and pasting together “food” or “pets”. When she is in the flow, she is not at all concerned about whether her drawings have anything to do with reality or not – she is simply having fun.

Play. Is anyone up for a tea party? I am now trying to scale down our “afterschooling” and give daughter more time to play. She loves her teenage babysitter and was pretty excited to stay with her once last weekend. She is also a lot more open to joining other neighborhood kids outside. There is a group of young teenagers including her babysitter who seem to enjoy playing with little kids, and she gets to make more friends lately. In other news – she started swimming classes, and I hope that she will enjoy our community pool even more this coming summer.

Do You Think Good Chairs and Desks Matter?

I have been contacted by CSN Stores to do another product review. For once this generous offer from the company that has more than 200 online stores made me think not about toys but about furniture. Right now Anna either does her crafting sitting on her knees at the big kitchen table or she sits at her own little table from IKEA on a backless stool (also from IKEA). I worry somewhat about her posture. I also dream of a nice Herman Miller office chair for myself like this Aeron chair. I have an adjustable chair both at home in the office, but they are not nearly as comfortable. Maybe one day I will get one (when I am a CEO or at least a chairman of a board, I think).

Anyway, I am wondering if you have special desks and chairs for your children? Any recommendations?

Geography and Science – Arctic

We wrapped up the theme of Arctic this week by watching Arctic Tale and making an arctic lapbook. If you haven’t seen Arctic Tale, try to rent it (we got ours in the library). The footage is amazing. One warning – there are several deaths in the movie, including two members of “supporting cast”. Anna, however, is not fazed with animal deaths and took them in stride. She had a lot of questions after the movie and said that she wants to watch it again. My favorite part was narwhals – I’ve never seen them “in action” before.

Now on to the lapbook. Here is what went into it:

• Where is Arctic map on the front page
• Arctic Animals folder game
• Polar Bear beginner book (mostly for coloring)
• Arctic word search (Anna requested to have a word search)
• Arctic Water Animal mix-and-match book
• Eskimo boy and dog for pretend play.

I promised to write about our ice experiments. I kept them simple. The most involved one was freezing the string to an ice cube using salt. I had to try it a few times before it worked, and it only worked long enough to take this picture. We also tried different ways to melt an ice cube and a prediction of how much water will be in the cup full of ice cubes after the ice melts. Anna predicted that the water will overflow and was quite surprised to discover that it didn’t even fill half the cup. She also discovered the benefits of insulation by using gloves instead of bare hands to play with ice. Normally she doesn’t get to wear gloves where we live.

I have to say that almost all the time while doing this Arctic theme I had the feeling that Anna was not really into it. Maybe it was because it was parent-directed learning instead of child-directed learning. Right now all she is talking about is space – so I think we will leave Earth for a bit for a journey into space next.

I am linking this post to Geography/History Exchange at Children Grow, Children Explore, Children Learn and to Science Sunday at Adventures in Mommydom.