November 18, 2012

friday wrap-up

Ahh, sweet quietness of kids working hard. Right now it's tickets to their secret clubhouse. 'It's not a fort, it's a secret clubhouse' geez mom!
Thankful for a much smoother week this week. Back to our regular routine with even enough steadiness to have a few field tripish activities - taking some school work to Panera and then a trip to the park afterwards - melted my cabin fever down a bit!

This week we continued the beeswax polishing - nuts, furniture, some crabapples. The house smells good! And I was pleasantly surprised about Laithe's independence with this. 

I pulled out a categorizing activity - 4 pictures, 3 of which are similarly themed to see how that would go. Totally over Laithe's head, but it was interesting listening to Guthrie explain to him why we put the X where we did. We also categorized the National Park cards Nana Loree brought us this summer - pictures of parks with mountains, deserts, caves, etc. 


The story this week was Stone Soup which we used as kind of a benign intro to the Thanksgiving story. I made this little peg doll playset inspired by Rhythm of the Home via Pinterest, hushed my inner-Cultural Studies MA concerns regarding what to teach my children about Thanksgiving and hot glued the shit out that tepee. 


Guthrie worked on word building with her movable alphabet and after I presented the first one she told me she could do it on her own - and she did, just fine. We discovered she has 4 pages left of her workbook and I'm encouraging her to finish it up before we start our break.

There was relatively little reading done by her this week. I think it's probably my fault. She discovered a page of stickers that go along with the books and I said that she could have them after we read the 10th book - she's on book 7 - and bam! no more reading. She's never been much of a reward girl - I would do well to remember that in the future! Except she likes rewards for completing her chore jar tasks, but they're usually chocolate chips, so I don't blame her. From now on reading will just be its own reward! 

There was more graphing of nuts, using our number tiles to work on 10-20s (Guthrie can count to 100 but 12-15 are a struggle), measuring as we baked and cooked. 

I forget where I heard about using scissors with playdough to practice cutting, but I'm always looking for additional tools to stick in the playdough. And they both really enjoyed it. 

We sponge painted turkeys and made suncatcher collages with clear contact paper and tissue paper on the windows. Guthrie was disappointed they didn't turn into prisms and make rainbows.



On a recent trip to the library I picked up Waiting for Winter and we're all pretty enamoured with it. The vast majority of the illustrations are in pencil and there aren't words on every page - I love those books so much these days. They allow you to narrate the story in your head rather than being told what is happening. I love watching the kids figure out what has happened and do my best to not narrate where the story doesn't! I should put together a list of our favorites.  We are also enjoying Sleep, Black Bear, Sleep and Barn Cat. Guthrie is in love with Dust Devil and I'm so tired of reading it. I know it's won all kinds of awards, but I cannot find the rhythm of it - making it not my favorite read aloud. 

I'm looking forward to getting our winter books out in the next couple weeks - not even just the Christmas ones. I think the kids will enjoy it too. I've noticed they're not picking books out of the fall basket as often. 

Next Wednesday starts our Winter Break and so unless something amazing happens between now and then the next time I'll write a Wrap-Up will be in January. This has been a much more stressful fall than I anticipated and I'm looking forward to a break. Some serious crafting and end of the year purging and reorganization as well as getting inspiration for our Winter quarter. I've begun to look at our days and weeks in terms of in-breath and out-breath activities and plans- making sure we have balance - and this mama needs some in-breath time. 

Happy Break!!

1 comment:

Luci & Loree said...

oh, looks & sounds like alot of activities!!! would the Natl Geo Kids mag be useful for you all???

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