Spring Book Ideas...
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Just some ideas on books to welcome spring, if it ever gets up the guts to kick winter out the overdue door. Ahem, I digress.
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Leo the Late Bloomer - one of my absolute favorites from childhood, helping children to appreciate that everything (and everyone) has their season to bloom.
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Play with Me - originally published in 1955, this classic story of a little girl who has gone to the meadow to play in a beautiful hand-sketched world.
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Guess How Much I Love You - an absolute classic, the illustration on the cover alone melts my heart. And of course the whole rabbit theme is popular around this time of year.
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Carrot Seed - Ruth Krause, who also wrote A Hole is to Dig (which I LOVE), has created this beautifully simple story about a little boy waiting for his garden to grow.
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Each Peach Pear Plum - A play on the classic fairy tales, with adorable rhymes and pictures that have secret characters worth searching for (so fun and cute and did I say fun?)
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Little Bunny Foo Foo - The girls insisted this must be included - they love the story and the fact Mommy sings it with a crazy voice.
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The Little Rabbit - A simple story of a little girl and her new rabbit, with great photographs of springtime and of course little white rabbits.
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The Country Bunny and the Little Golden Shoes - The story of a momma bunny who is all worn out with her eleven-plus kiddos. She is shocked when she gets the opportunity to become an official Easter Bunny.
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The Velveteen Rabbit - The Margery Williams classic is such a beautiful story of childlike love, especially for two little girls who just gave up their comfort objects.

Whatever could I be up to?
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Among the fifteen balls I am trying to keep in the air this fall (figuratively speaking), the one that will be the most blog-worthy is the girl's birthday party. They co-celebrate, they are co-celebrants, they are turning another year older.
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Back to the point, I am scanning images for this quarky idea I have for the invites. I might not sleep tonight actually, so that might be a little dangerous for my drive to work tomorrow. But the invitations will be awesome and that's all that matters. (For those of you who take me way too seriously...I will actually go to bed at a reasonable time because I am a mom and when you have your children the hospital injects you with the 'responsiblility-drug' that makes you think about things like going to bed at a reasonable hour - they usually mix it with a good dose of 'guilt-drug' to keep you from getting too cocky about how responsible you are.)

Art has been the focus of summer with the girls and the handsome one. Carolyn loves to draw elaborate princesses with long jeweled hair. She is also a huge fan of writing now, so she'll holler into the other room "Mommy!?! How do you spell 'princess'!?!" Her princess even comes with two stick-straight arms and legs and round, perky...well, you'll see.

Accomplished on this day:

B has taught Carolyn to draw a rockin kitty cat

I kind of burnt myself out on flashcards about a year ago. I had been working with C on letters and numbers and after feeling as though we would finally conquer L and T I simply quite. I even gave our flashcards to Good Will...I'm impulsive like that, it's  a weakness to be sure.

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Turns out C is getting very jazzed up about letters and numbers lately, so I am now kicking myself and looking for affordable creative flashcards to inspire brilliance. I found these cute and simple cards on etsy. They are all well-and-good but I'm thinking I could actually make something far more affordable. I really like the idea below which are laminated, also from etsy but totally reproducable. And then I got this idea involving the hardware store and paint chips and now I am wondering if Lowe's stays open until 11 because I'd sure like to try my idea out pronto...like I said, I'm impulsive.

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We took advantage of the gorgeous weather by going on a

Green Scavenger Hunt

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The premise was very simple and super inexpensive (free actually). C and I went searching for all things green, digital camera in hand. We searched the house, we stopped along the road as we drove, searched at school, and the grocery store. She was totally into it, and she loved that we were able to walk for blocks just to snap a picture of a stop light. Perhaps I will print up our scavenger hunt finds into a poster for her art space (so much for free - shocker, I found a way to make something that was formerly free all of a sudden cost money - it's a gift I have).

Read Prayer for a Child by Rachel Field tonight to the girls at bedtime. Such a sweet way to end a day. "Bless my Father and my Mother...And keep them close to one another". "So let me sleep and let me wake...In peace and health, for Jesus' sake." "Amen"

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I am so enamoured with the illustrations that I scanned this page and printed it large on a piece of archival photo paper. I had a spare 11x14 frame so I'm going to frame it. I just LOVE all the children's faces - beautiful.

Tonight was a Treasure Hunt night

at the local Antique Mall - and this time Grandma joined in the fun

all four of us came home with a treasure

C - Pink unicorn costume
complete with four legs and obnoxiously huge head

Grandma - Witch decoration for Halloween

J - Baby doll (what else!?!)
with open/shut eyes, tattered sailor outfit and lots of hair

K - Robert Louis Stevenson's A Child's Garden of Verses
a beautiful pink tea-towel hand embroidered with blue birds
to start my tea-towel collection {it's a new thing I'm starting},
and AND and a hard-back copy of Blueberries for Sal -
one of the books we had hoped to do this summer for
Before Five in a Row but could not find anywhere!!!

Becky happened to call on my way home,
I had to share the exciting Blueberries for Sal book find

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she said she thinks J looks like Sal -
and it's SO true - all the better

Isn't she cute when she's concentrating? She's all about the workbook we bought her [Get Ready for THE CODE]. It is an awesome book to prep kids for learning to write. Now when she hears a new name she sounds out the first letter to figure out what it starts with. My hat-is-off to people who teach children to read. The more we work on this, the more I realize our language is bizarre. For instance, while 'Katie' and 'Carolyn' both start with the 'k' sound, they start with different letters...now that's confusing, and it's just the start, can't wait until we get to the 'ch' and 'sh' and 'th'.

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We worked with The Carrot Seed again today,

it was one of the most fun lessons to-date.

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We first had to find a large roll of newsprint which led us to our local newspaper. I guess all newspapers do this, so it will work anywhere, but they gave us a huge roll of newsprint (the end of the roll for them) for $3.00. Thus began our learning adventure...

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Then we rolled out the print on the kitchen table and cut a piece about 5-feet long. I free-hand drew an incredibly awkward carrot that we then painted orange with water colors. In order to achieve the orange with the four colors we had (red, yellow, blue and green) C learned to mix yellow and red to make orange....the learning continues...

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We hung the very large and wet carrot to dry in the window, which looked really beautiful with the thin paper allowing so much light to come through. Once it was dry we read the story of the carrot that finally grew, and then pulled out the girl's baby books to talk about how much they have grown. We marked the carrot at their birth height, 6-months old, one year and then where they are now. It was fun to look at how much they have grown in such a short time.
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C was being quite the little model as she posed with the carrot,

see all of the fun shots of the lesson by clicking here.

B started The Carrot Seed with C today. This is a great book for a three-year-old. The illustrations and the story-line are simple...so simple in fact that she 'read' the whole story to her Grandma Caryl tonight. She got most of the story-line right, and was VERY excited that the big carrot grew at the end. I love her enthusiasm, it's contagious.

B worked with C yesterday on Corduroy. They learned all about buttons (what they do, how they all look different) and then they made this great picture frame from lots of buttons.

We wrapped up Goodnight Moon for the week.

I tried to be more intentional with time management,

so we got all of our lessons in, including animal classification

we will create a similar notecard for all of the animals

we see in our books this summer. C actually really enjoyed this activity.
This week we start Corduroy, exciting stuff!

We wrapped up the first week of our book study. We did If Jesus Came to My House first. I have to admit it was very hard for me to be disciplined enough to set-aside time everyday for this endeavor. You'd think 30 minutes aren't that hard to find, but they have to be at a time when the girls are not hungry/sleepy/grumpy/antsy or distracted...some days I don't think there are even 5 minutes that fit this criteria! So, basically we did one of the four lessons in full (see above for Carolyn exploring utilizing only black and red ink in her art work, similar to the book's illustrations) and the other two were briefly touched on tonight as we wrapped up the week. We begin Goodnight Moon this week, hopefully something profound will develop - and how could it not? "Goodnight Nobody, Goodnight mush, and Goodnight to the old lady whispering hush" - good stuff!

This summer we will be exploring each of these books in depth,

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I will be working with Carolyn on one book per week this summer. For each book we will do four lessons that discuss topics such as the geography/unique locations of the story, animals in the story, art/illustrations, lessons learned such as manners, and on-and-on. All of the lessons have been developed in Before Five in a Row for children two to four years old. It is a fantastic resource and I am excited to watch Carolyn learn through these classic books.

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[I listed the books on the right side of my blog, anyone who wants to follow along is more than welcome, I think I've just about got Nathan roped in, but he doesn't know that yet!]