Friday, December 10, 2010

Winter Reading

It seems like the tendency around the holidays is that kids tend to have their heads in the clouds. It's easy for that to happen to adults as well!

Around here, the cold weather isn't really something that keeps the boys from going outside. In fact, they have actually said that they enjoy playing outside more when it's cooler more than they do when it is hot.

However with Christmas coming up and with this momma needing to work on some projects, I decided to come up with an idea to give them something extra to do that would be educational.

So, I decided to do a "reading contest". Today we finished our cute little bulletin board for the wall.  Very, very easy!

I used a foam posterboard. I also found some great lined stationary at this site on which to write book information.
Clipart can be printed from here. We used a glue-stick to paste everything to the board except for their book lists.  I pinned those.
The boys are to write on the list what books they read, the author, and how many pages. I told them that they get a sticker for every 20 pages read. The older boys get extra incentives for reading to Ryan out loud.

I sat down with Michael and we decided that the "contest" would go through the month of December and into January. We decided what the rewards would be and made it something they'd be excited to get.  Some ideas are cash, dates with dad, inexpensive outings, privileges such as getting to stay up later, etc.

The main rule is that I get to choose the books they read. I decided to choose a mix of topics so that they will actually be learning what I want them to learn. When I had reading contests in the past, they tended to pick easy books that had no significance.

We are using our local library.  Justin is already begging me to go back and get more books as he has read almost everything I have chosen (and that was just on Friday!).

Friday, December 3, 2010

Wakko's NATIONS of the world

FUN! I don't know if I could teach it this fast though....

Bunny Trails

Occasionally when we are reading a book or discussing something, we will
go on a "bunny trail."

Today was like that. We are currently reading a book called Growing Together in Courage by Barbara Rainey.
It is a fantastic compilation of stories about people who exhibited courage during extreme situations. After reading one of the stories (which are all true), we somehow landed on the topic of September 11th, 2001. As we were discussing it, I realized that the boys-especially the two youngest- hadn't heard much about that horrible, not-so-long-ago day. That led me to the computer to pull up some clips of the Twin Towers being attacked and collapsed, which led to a torrent of tears, which led to a documentary about it. Basically we spent most of the day talking about what happened and all of the courageous people involved. So what started out as a short story to introduce the topic of courage to my children, led to an all-day "study".
I think they do truly understand how important courage  is.
Bunny trails are good.

Thursday, December 2, 2010

Wakko's universe song

Of course we explain that God made it all. This is just too fun!

Scripture Memory - Psalm 105:1-5

Our pastor challenged us to reflect on Psalm 105:1-5 during the week of Nov. 7 - 13. We had just finished our last set of verses, so we decided to make these our memory verses. For some reason, they love seeing themselves make silly faces. I guess it adds some excitement. :-)