Week In Review–Oct 30, 2011

Thank you, everyone for joining Afterschool party last week. There were so many fun ideas in more than 30 entries. My favorite was milk jugs as Halloween lanterns – a very original idea brought to us by Bowerbird Blue.

School. It makes me happy that Anna continues to love school so much. It seems that she is fairly popular in her class. Her favorite boy gave her a birthday class that said, “Anna is a good friend and a great reader”. Her teacher had a special “exhibition science class” this week for other district teachers, and Anna loved it very much. They are learning about the three states of matter in science.

Afterschool. We had a fairly laid-back week. Anna played on DreamBox a few times. Her mental math abilities seem to get better every day. She also wrote a list of “Halloween-related” things. It featured such things as hontid hows, gost and wich. I am glad that she is no longer afraid of spelling mistakes and writes more what she wants to say not what she knows how to spell. Guided activities were on our October topics of Halloween and Picasso.

Places we are going. Parties galore! We had Anna’s birthday party last weekend, then we went on a Halloween party in her afterschool program on Friday, and on Saturday she was invited to her classmate’s birthday that had a fun bird show. She also really clicked with one of her classmates, and now these two have very fun playdates every Tuesday.

Favorite moments? Hmm… It’s been kind of a hard week for me, since it’s my turn to catch Anna’s virus. We are also dealing with a bit of a “hangover” from all the birthday excitement. I recall that when Anna turned 4, she sort of regressed a bit as if she were pushing back on new demands of being older. There is something similar going on now, but most of the time she is still a sweet and cuddly child who is a bit scared of what her new year might bring and looks for reassurance that she is not suddenly going to be asked a whole lot more.

Quote of the week: We have a station in school where we play with blocks, but I don’t like it. Blocks are boring unless you can destroy what something else is doing. Usually L (a girl) is building a castle with a princess in it, and the boys and I are building soldiers to destroy her castle and we try to take her princess. Next time I will build a jail for the princess – that is going to be FUN!
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What My Child Is Reading–Halloween Books

Anna’s reading assignment this week was Froggy Gets Dressed by Jonathan London. While we find Froggy book enjoyable, we read pretty much all of them over the last year, so I decided not to extend the topic and focus on Halloween books instead. Now, we don’t believe in scary and gory here – all our favorite Halloween books are focusing mostly on trick-or-treating.

Space Case by Edward and James Marshall is my absolute favorite Halloween book from the ones we own. It’s a nice combination of an alien story and a Halloween story. I found the reactions of adults in the story hilarious and not that far removed from reality. Anna didn’t care much for the book last year, but was able to appreciate the story line much better this year.

My daughter loves numbers – the bigger the better. She learned lately that the fastest way to make numbers “really big” is through multiplication. She really enjoyed 2x2=Boo! by Loreen Leedy (in general we love her books!) that teaches multiplication through 5x5 via Halloween short stories. Some of them are a bit more gory than our usual Halloween read, but Anna doesn’t mind since her mind is focused on math, not on the story. She keeps reading this book and asks to be quizzed on her multiplication facts every night (no encouragement on my part, completely self-directed).

Three Little Ghostsies by a European pair Pippa Goodhart/AnnaLaura Cantone can be scary or funny depending on how you want to read it. The rhyme is silly, and my daughter enjoyed the way word endings were changed to fit the rhyme. Illustrations are very distinctive – even my daughter can do a good approximation of these ghostsies, and I really loved the ending where the naughty ghostsies have the tables turned on them.

The Story of Halloween by Carol Greene illustrated by Linda Bronson is a non-fictional story about the origin of Halloween. I thought it was a bit too long and boring for one-sitting reading, but there didn’t seem to be a logical place to stop. We learned some new facts from the book – how about a hollowed-out turnip for Halloween, but overall this book didn’t quite charm any of us. Oh well, you can’t win every time

Halloween Scenes

We read a lot of Halloween books in October. Every week I brought back from the library a few. I didn’t read most of them myself, but I will share some shared Halloween reads in my Saturday What My Child Is Reading post. I thought some “summary craft” is in order, but our days have been busy, and we were rapidly running out of time. So yesterday I set up this collage activity before I picked up Anna from her afterschool.

She was actually more interested in going outside and convincing two teenage girls that they have no better use of their time than to push her on a tire swing for an hour. Eventually she got back home and got to work.

She drew a haunted house with ghosts coming out of the windows. Thanks to her papa, she is really into drawing ghosts this Halloween.

Frankenstein Monster was a surprise touch. I didn’t know she knows Frankenstein. She explained to me that he is a lumbering sad creature.This is Anna’s finished masterpiece. Go Pumpkins!

I couldn’t resist making one too. Anna loved my moon

Weekend Snapshots–October 22-23

Saturday started with a morning birthday party in Pump-It Up – always a big hit for kids of Anna’s age…

Anna’s first girl friend – she looks so much bigger than Anna even though they are in K together.Presents are unpacked and sorted into “play now”, “re-gift” (have doubles), “art projects”, and “play later” piles. Anna’s favorite so far is Operation game!

On Sunday we unpacked the presents from German side of the family. Oma and Opa (with our help) gave Anna a mini-keyboard. It transpired rather quickly though that she is as beat-deaf as I am. Any suggestions to help us feel the beat?

We also had time to go outside and enjoy an unseasonably warm weather we are having. We drove to a different park, and Anna really enjoyed getting out her sand toys and making all kinds of yummy salads and ice creams for me.

We don’t decorate for Halloween as wildly as some of our neighbors, but my husband was feeling playful, and drew some ghosts (each of them is slightly different than all the rest). Anna and I helped cut and draw faces on them. I think these 10 little ghosts look great in our kitchen window.

Week In Review–Oct 23, 2012

Welcome all to Afterschool that is hosted this week on my blog. My posts are “week in review” type posts, but I really enjoy visiting other blogs and reading about all the exciting activities you are doing at home to supplement what your children are learning and doing in school.

School. This week was a special birthday week, which didn’t go quite as planned. Anna caught some sort of virus, which caused 3 days of fever. She missed 2 days of school, but, luckily, she was fine on Wednesday and could celebrate with her classmates. She is so happy and proud to be five even though she is still so much younger than everyone else in her class.

Afterschool. Despite being sick, Anna craved things to do while she was stuck at home. We read some more about Picasso and she did three of the projects in Sticker Art Shapes book that I got for her. It’s a nice way to get to know some of Picasso’s works by trying to recreate them, but I was a bit disappointed as to which works were included – they seemed very random. She also did some Halloween word search and copywork.

Places we are going. Last Saturday we went sailing with friends in San Francisco Bay. Anna was very excited about going, and it was interesting to see how confident she felt on the boat. Unfortunately, it was the day of her getting sick, so she was not quite her usual energetic self and even took an unexpected nap (dead giveaway of her not feeling well). Still, it was a great trip, especially the part when we were really sailing and not just motoring.

Favorite moments – this was an exciting week. I loved that Anna enjoyed most of her birthday without even asking for her presents – she was just happy to be able to go to school and be with her friends and with her family. In the evening she opened a big package from my parents. Papa made her a very special present – a little house that actually connects with the castle that he had made for her last year.

Ignore the grumpy expression in this picture – Anna just couldn’t wait to go to her Halloween party and didn’t want to stop for the picture. From conversation on her birthday about her favorite things to do:

• 1. Hanging out with you, hugging and cuddling.
• 2. Reading.
• 3. Learning new things.
• 4. Cuddling.
• 5. Playing on the computer.
• 6. When L comes over and wants to play (our neighbor who apparently decided that he is going to marry Anna when they grow up).

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What My Child Is Reading–Books About Bridges

Anna’s school assignment this week was Frog and Toad Are Friends by Arnold Lobel. While this is a great book, we actually have it at home, and Anna was not really interested in reading the series again at the moment. So I decided to catch up on our FIAR reading, and we read a series of books about bridges. We are also reading together Who Was Pablo Picasso? by True Kelly. It’s our second book from this biography series. The first one was Who Were the Beatles?, and Anna practically memorized it.

The Little Red Lighthouse and the Great Gray Bridge is a Five in a Row (FIAR) book. I think I enjoyed it more than Anna – she was feeling for the most of the book that something bad is about to come, and she doesn’t like suspense. She also felt sorry for the Lighthouse. It was interesting for me to read the story of the real lighthouse – I realized that I’ve seen it many times driving on Hudson Highway in NYC, since it’s no longer in its original place.

Purely photographic books are sort of hit and miss with Anna, but she really enjoyed Golden Gate Bridge by Kate Riggs, part of Now That’s Big! series. I think she liked it so much, because it’s “her” bridge. She could kind of remember George Washington Bridge from the first book from her trips to grandparents, but it doesn’t have the same personal meaning to her. The book gives a brief history of how and why it was build and has some gorgeous photos in it.

I highly recommend Bridges Are to Cross by Philemon Stuges to people who follow FIAR curriculum as a complementary reading for The Little Red Lighthouse. This book talks about various famous bridges around the world and describes in short paragraphs their purpose. Illustrations by Giles Laroche are beautiful, they look almost photographic. Great read for different ages.

Let’s Try It Out is obviously a “true book” – we read some others in these series too. Unfortunately, it was a lot more about towers than bridges, and we didn’t get to do experiments yet, but the book explains some very rudimentary ideas about building stable structures very well and age-appropriate for 4+ kids.

Happy Birthday, My 5 Year-Old!

Dear Anna!

It seemed that only yesterday papa and I were heading to the hospital to meet you for the first time. Boy, how fast the time flew by! I am looking at the new babies in our circle of friends, and it’s hard for me to remember the time when you were so tiny, so sweet and so helpless.

You are still very tiny for your five years and very sweet, but you are far from helpless. You grew into a funny, talkative, and confident kindergartener who wants so hard to always do the right thing. You like to follow the rules and enforce them if the opportunity presents itself, but you can also be very opinionated. You love to try new things, especially if they don’t involve anything that you perceive dangerous (you tend to be cautious) and meet new people. You absolutely love learning, and reading is your favorite thing to do. Everyone we meet comments how enthusiastic (that means “loud”) you are and how happy you seem to be. It’s a lot of fun to be with you, to answer you “why” and “what if” questions and follow you wherever your mind leads you. I hope you stay healthy and happy in this new chapter of your life, my Anna-girl.

Love,                      Mama.

Drawing Picasso Style

I am receiving a monthly update in my email from Curriculum Click with Teachable Moments. I decided to select a few of them for drilling deeper. This month it was Columbus Day, Picasso Birthday and, obviously, Halloween. We are still waiting for Picasso books to arrive from the Interlib, but I got the one that was available in our local library – Picasso from Getting to Know the World’s Greatest Artists by Mike Venezia. I wasn’t sure if Anna will like this book, but she was quite excited about Picasso drawings and immediately started to brainstorm all the different ideas of how she is going to draw in Picasso style. She hatched an idea to draw a portrait of one particular boy that he dislikes with his behind where the head should be, and she was still fired up to execute on it the next day. We used pastel oil crayons and a sharpie. As usual her coloring ended up to be very untidy, but, hey, at least we can pretend that she is an impressionistic master in training:

Week In Review–October 16, 2011

School. This is the last week of Anna as a 4 year old. She is excited about her birthday, but not as wild as last year. I guess she has a lot of things to occupy her time and attention. School was OK. It worries me a little that they didn’t even mention Columbus Day in school – it seems that practically all time is taken by 3Rs. But she still enjoys school and is excited to go there every morning.

Afterschool was busy, since I had somewhat more time this week. Anna continues to be very interested in math and begs to play Dreambox every day. It’s interesting to see what she grasps literally on the fly and what she is still struggling with. She is very fascinated with big numbers and learned in about 10 minutes to add them (without a carryover) and to read back the results. At the same time she still uses her fingers sometimes to calculate how much is, say, 6+3.

Favorite moments this week included going to a local pumpkin patch and doing some quick pumpkin decorating. We also had a friend from Germany staying with us for a day, this time Anna was not put off by a fact that he is over 2 meters tall. And we had a great playdate with her classmate last Saturday. Anna seems to connect really well with this boy, and we really liked his mother, so perhaps it will be the beginning of a friendship between our families.

Favorite quote: We were discussing Anna’s “skill of the week” in school – organization.

• Me: Do you know what “organization” means?
• Anna: Putting things where they belong.
• Me: Not only that. It also means having a plan for what you are going to do.
• Anna: So if I plan to make a big mess, does it count as organization?

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