Grand Adventure: family, house building and travel, Pacific Northwest style
We are a few days shy of having D home with us for an entire year (minus a few much appreciated weeks of summer day camp). For better or worse, we are much more involved with his education and there's no need to ask "how was your day?" or "what did you learn about in math?" because we already know.
Although it has been overwhelming at times, in many ways it has been really fun. He has so much to learn and so many topics are at a level where Jack and I are effectively experts. We've talked about fractions, wars, alphabetization and so many other things.
On the other hand when we get in to questions about physical sciences I am far from an expert and my explanations falter. He and I listened to the audio book of Who Ate the First Oyster, a popular science book answering a series questions about human history. Each question is a chapter and the explanations were at a good level for me. Examples include, "Who rode the first horse?" and "Who was the first surgeon?" as well as a chapter on smallpox and the first vaccines for it. D followed most of the explanations of how we know what we know, once we discussed them and I explained words. The book is only 210 pages and I checked the audio book out from the library about 8 times between July and December, so it was slow going, but was easy to pick up again periodically since the chapters were self-contained. Going slow and explaining thing vastly increased my comprehension and retention as well, though don't ask me to recall many numbers.
Watching his analytical skills grow is really rewarding. In the books we read aloud he is always excited to try to predict the plot, as well. Jack taught us the term "plot armor" which is quite useful, especially in kids' books.
To be fair I appreciate that his first grade teacher has done a good job with online school. She's demo'd some science experiments and he gets 4 math small groups and 4 vocab/reading/spelling small groups a week.
No, not the world series .... books!
The Seattle Public Library finally opened up a few weeks ago for curbside pickup. I've been going once a week to pick up holds and D's rate of reading and the fact that there's no browsing has been keeping me on my toes. My mom has also brought us lots of new books for the last few months since the King County Libraries opened earlier.
For better or worse, children's chapter books seem to be all in series so I've had to get organized about tracking which books he's already read. To celebrate D's reading and to keep track of future books for Dd, here are the series we've been reading. He reads a lot of these in about an hour, so finding age appropriate stories that can keep him busy for longer periods of time is getting tougher.
Series We Have Read Several of:
Series We Have Just Started:
Books We Want to Read:
We’ve almost finished reading James and the Giant Peach to D. I bought a Roald Dahl set on a whim a while ago, thinking chapter books were a long ways off. Then we started reading one as an experiment and it’s been really fun, after getting past the beginning where James becomes an orphan and has to live with his terrible, physically and emotionally abusive aunts. He understands way more than we expected, recalls details from the previous day’s reading and asks questions that show that he’s following the plot!
A good kids book is one you don’t mind reading over and over again, so spoiling the plot isn’t a faux pas like it would be for other types of stories. So, allow me to simultaneously recommend and spoil these excellent picture books for you,
Both of these books have peaceful resolutions because a character is overcome by the wonderful smell of flowers.
The first book goes beyond the funny role reversal of the wolf and pigs, with great pictures and good details. The moral of the story is that it’s not possible to build a fortress and be perfectly safe from the outside world. Though they didn’t intentionally change the big bad pig’s character with the flowers, they were forgiving when they befriended the newly minted big good pig.
I have some vague memories of being read Ferdinand when I was a kid and it’s one of the few books my dad remembers from his childhood, so it has survived the test of time. The pictures are excellent and it has a good message about staying true to oneself, despite outside pressures to conform.
I would have liked to round out this post with a third book, but I don’t want to water down the floral scent denouement theme!
