Author Archives: Deanna

How to Make an Apple Pie and See the World

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Over the last two weeks we’ve been rowing How to Make an Apple Pie and See the World by Marjorie Priceman.  Ian loved the story and all the activities we did from the Five in a Row manual (Vol. 1). In addition to reading it several times, we watched a cute reading of the story on YouTube as well as a Reading Rainbow episode featuring the book. (Our library has most of the series on DVD.)  I focused mostly on geography and the sources of the various ingredients, but we also had fun doing math with a bowl of apples on the kitchen table and a few other suggestions.

We talked about the seven continents as we put together a puzzle map of the world.  (I also found some free coloring pages about the continents at CurrClick.)  Then we used the story disks from the printables at Homeschool Share to locate the various places in the book.

I printed and laminated a set of cards for matching various elements of the girl’s trip around the world. Elijah practiced sorting them into three piles based on the pictures (country, food and modes transportation), while Ian matched up the proper cards into a pile for each location.

  

Of course, the highlight of our time with this book was making an apple pie.  We tried to get the freshest ingredients possible.

We spent a day at an apple farm and picked our apples right off the tree.

  

We made our own butter by shaking whipping cream (and a pinch of salt) in baby food jars.

  

We even evaporated our own salt.  We had planned to get an egg from our friends’ chicken, but that didn’t work out.  Either did grinding our own cinnamon, though Ian was impressed with the bark.

  

After begging all week to make our pie, Ian was a great helper when we finally had collected all our ingredients.

  

And voila! Our beautiful (and delicious) apple pie!

We decided it looked too good to settle for eating it plain, so we also made some homemade vanilla ice cream by rolling it around in a pair of coffee cans.  Heavenly!

To see what other FIAR books we’ve rowed, see my “Index of FIAR Posts.”  Also, a great place to see what other people have done with FIAR books is the FIAR Blog Roll at Delightful Learning.

Posted in FIAR, Literature Units, Preschool

Composer Study: Claude Debussy

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Last month we started becoming familiar with the music of French composer Claude Debussy.  There weren’t a lot of extras to go along with our study, but that didn’t lessen our enjoyment.  I’m realizing that one composer a month is rather a quick pace, for I’m finding myself surprised when we come to the end of a month and move on.  This first year I’m really only trying to introduce the whole idea of composer study, so I think we’ll keep with my original plan.  However, next year will be Ian’s official “Kindergarten” year, and I think then we’ll slow down a little and just do one composer per term, probably sticking with the suggested schedule from Ambleside Online.  (Actually, I included their composers for this year in our own schedule because I knew we wouldn’t be doing a full study and I wanted to hit all the major composers this year as an introduction.)

Here’s what we listened to in our month with Debussy:

Posted in Charlotte Mason, Composer Study

Long Story Short: Abram and God’s Promise

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In my women’s Bible study group at church this week we were talking about how the early church had to wrestle with the concept of including Gentiles into the people of God after so many years years of following the commandments of God’s Law which kept Israel so different from the other nations.  I immediately flashed back to what we had read the night before with our family in Long Story Short by Marty Machowski.  God told Abraham, “In you all the families of the earth shall be blessed” (Genesis 12:3).  That promise was made about two thousand years before the early church.  Throughout those two millenia, God had been laying the foundation through his interaction with Abraham’s descendants, preparing the way for the Christ who would open the way for all of us to return to the blessing of relationship with God.  The 1st century Jews knew the promise; they’d heard God’s reminders through the years about making them a light to the nations, yet when the time of fulfillment came, many struggled with knowing what exactly that should look like.  How hard it can be for us in our finite little minds to grasp where our situation falls in the big picture of God’s plan.

That’s one of my favorite things about using this devotional.  It helps me remember that the story of God promising to make Abram a great nation is about so much more than the life of a man who lived four thousand years ago.  It is part of MY story.  I’m not even part of Abraham’s family line, and yet I am blessed because of God’s promise and Abraham’s faith.  What seems like such a long story as you read through the Bible really is quite short when you get right down to it.

As far as lessons, we didn’t do a whole lot this week aside from reading the five devotions and the corresponding story from The Gospel Story Bible.  For one thing, we’re still settling into our fall activities and I haven’t yet found my “groove.”  For another thing, we’re going to be spending more than a month on Abraham, and most of the extra activities I’ve seen go long with other parts of the story. (We also were enjoying diving into our October composer study, starting a math program, and “rowing” and our Five in a Row book, so we kept plenty busy!) We did work on a memory verse (“By faith he went to live in the land of promise.” Hebrews 11:9), but other than that we took it easy and may continue to do so for another week, just doing Bible time each night and our “listening lesson” during the day.  Here’s what was on our playlist this past week:

Posted in Bible lessons, Long Story Short, Preschool, The Gospel Story

Long Story Short: The Tower of Babel

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This week we learned about the Tower of Babel.  I was surprised how much we were able to do with this story.  On the first night’s reading in Long Story Short by Marty Machowski, we read through Genesis 10, which contains the geneology of Noah’s sons. You would think that would be boring, but it actually led to a couple interesting discussions, including one about geneologies and ancestors.  We pulled out a family tree that we have on a large scroll, on which my husband’s side is traced back to the 15oo’s.  We talked about how if we knew who was on that “tree” before those ancestors, it would lead all the way back to Noah (most likely through Japheth, if the traditional understanding of the nations is true).  I don’t know if it meant much to the boys, but I was kind of awed by that thought.

Another logical subject to study along with the story of Babel was the idea of languages and nations.  Ian’s always asking what the Spanish words are for various things so he loved this part of our lesson.  I don’t know if Elijah understood the concept or not, but it was a nice introduction for him.  We listened to familiar songs sung in Spanish and samples of other languages.  I also showed the boys video from when I lived in Kenya and worked with Maasai still living traditionally in rural villages.  And we looked at Precious In His Sight, a book with pictures of children from various nations all around the world.

The reading for Day 5 was from Isaiah 1:18 “Come now, let us reason together, says the Lord: though your sins are like scarlet, they shall be as white as snow; though they are red like crimson, they shall become like wool.”  So for Bible time on one of our extra nights, I taught the boys the hymn, “Nothing But the Blood of Jesus.”  (We also read from The Gospel Story Bible one night.)*

Reading Practice

I didn’t do a whole lot of reading practice with Ian this time (we had a crazy busy week!), but here’s what we did read together:

  • The Young Reader’s Bible by Bonnie Bruno (he and I read this one together because he’s not quite ready for it on his own.)
  • Jibber Jabber by Mary Manz Simon
  • Ian practiced reading our memory verse, “God opposes the proud, but gives grace to the humble” James 4:6 using the process I described in this post.

Bible Notebook

Our notebook page this week was simple: just a sheet with our Bible verse on which they build towers using “bricks” of construction paper.  I learned that it worked best to draw a line of glue and have them build a row at a time.  Otherwise we just ended up with floating bricks all over the page.

  

Activities

The boys enjoyed building towers with our stacking blocks (and knocking them down, of course).

  

I also printed out a dot-to-dot (pg.5 of the document) for them to do.  (I put things like this in sheet protectors so they can do them over and over again with dry erase markers.)

Multimedia

Our “Listening Lesson” included several children’s songs the boys already know, only sung in Spanish:

The kids enjoyed the Spanish songs so much I decided to purchase Cantos Biblicos, the Spanish version of a CD of Bible songs we already have in English.  (Actually, I downloaded the MP3 version because I’d collected a few MP3 credits in various ways and had been saving them for something school-related.)  My hope is that not only will the boys have fun learning Bible songs in Spanish, but maybe we can even use them in ministry someday!

*I also considered reading Acts 2:1-12 and discussing the story of Pentecost, but I decided that might be too confusing for preschoolers, though I’d use it with older children.

Posted in Bible lessons, Long Story Short, Preschool, The Gospel Story

The Salamander Room

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Last week we “rowed” The Salamander Room by Anne Mazer.  It was a cute story, and Ian really got into it, but we didn’t do a whole lot of extras.  We did some of the activities in the Five in a Row manual (Vol. 3), watched the Reading Rainbow episode that featured the book, and read About Amphibians by Cathryn Sill (love this series!).  There’s also a nice reading of the story on YouTube.

We also acquired a new pet, though it’s a reptile. Grandpa caught a gopher snake, and as with the bullfrogs we raised from tadpoles over the spring and summer, it’s proving to be quite the educational pet. Learning about our snake just as we were rowing this book provided a chance to talk about the differences between reptiles and amphibians. The boys are quite fascinated by “Rocky,” especially when it comes to watching him eat his weekly pinkies. (Having to buy live food also means trips to the pet store, so we got to see some live salamanders as well, which was a nice bonus.)  Ian was quite inspired by The Salamander Room and has enjoyed creating a little world for his snake.

To see what other FIAR books we’ve rowed, see my “Index of FIAR Posts.”  Also, a great place to see what other people have done with FIAR books is the FIAR Blog Roll at Delightful Learning.

Posted in FIAR, Literature Units, Preschool

Long Story Short: The Rainbow of God’s Promise

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Last week we continued in Long Story Short by Marty Machowski with the story of Noah’s ark, focusing on God’s promise, symbolized by the rainbow.  I love the connection between the ark and Jesus as the only way to be saved.   It’s taken me almost a week to write about it, and things are a bit hectic around here right now, so I’m afraid this is going to pretty much be the notes I jotted through the week just so I can get it all down for the record.

Go-Along Books

We kept out the books we read last week, as well as enjoying the story in The Rhyme Bible Storybook for Toddlers:

Reading Practice

  • The Young Reader’s Bible by Bonnie Bruno (Ian’s making progress on this but still isn’t quite ready to read it on his own.)
  • Cards to practice reading our memory verse: “Your steadfast love is great above the heavens; your faithfulness reaches to the clouds.” Psalm 108:4

Bible Notebook

I used a picture from dltk-kids and put it on a page with our memory verse.  It was a good chance to talk about the colors of the rainbow, especially since the picture had room for every color in the spectrum!

Activities

We broke out our flannel board set for the first time in months, and the boys REALLY enjoyed retelling the story with it.  I can’t count how many times Elijah went over to it throughout the week and told the story, sometimes to one of us, but most of the time just to himself.  I LOVE having this out to “narrate” the Bible story.  It really shows how deeply they’re internalizing what they’re learning.

  

The boys had fun sailing the paper “arks” I folded for them.  (Ian tried, but it was too hard even for him.)

  

Multimedia

We watched VeggieTales: Minnesota Cuke And The Search For Noahs Umbrella (available streaming on Netflix).

Our “Listening Lesson” was the same as last week plus the addition of Genesis 8 with the end of the Noah story.

Wow, that’s a boring post.  I do apologize.

Posted in Bible lessons, Long Story Short, Preschool, The Gospel Story

Long Story Short: God Chooses Noah

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The story of Noah’s ark is possibly the best-known Bible story ever.  Seriously.  You can find books, toys, and even find nursery decor depicting the ark and the animals going “two-by-two.”  So I was certainly not at a loss for ways to fill our days with things related to our Bible study this week.  The challenge was choosing what to pick and helping impress the story upon my children’s hearts.  Our devotional, Long Story Short by Marty Machowski, spends two weeks on the account of Noah, so we’ll save some of my plans, though it may be difficult to top the fun we had this week.

As usual, we filled in two nights of Bible time on top of the five devotions in the book.  One night we read the story from The Gospel Story Bible, and another we chose one of our “Go-Alongs” and enjoyed the beautiful illustrations.

Go-Along Books

There are SO many books out there that retell this Bible story.  We had a couplealready, and I added a few to our library based on their illustrations or unusual perspective.

Reading Practice

Confession: I slacked in this department this week.  In my defense, I did succeed in getting Ian back into his Reading Eggs lessons.  (He’d gone through them so fast he got a bit ahead of his abilities and it was no longer fun, so I’ve been giving him a break while he caught up.)

We did practice reading with our Bible memory verse cards.  This week’s verse was short and easy: “Noah did all that the Lord had commanded him.”  Genesis 7:5.

Bible Notebook

I kept our Bible notebook page simple.  My original plan was using an image of the ark drawing from Jan Brett’s website and then having the boys put animal stickers around it.  However, when I went to my sticker collection I realized I didn’t have a very good selection.  So instead, we just used the Oriental Trading Company’s Make-a-Bible Story Stickers.  I was afraid it was going to be boring, but both boys really enjoyed making their pages.

Activities

We are still in the throes of summer heat, so I’m all about keeping cool these days, whether that means quiet indoor activities, water play, or air-conditioned field trips.  For Ian’s “workbook” I printed out DLTK-Bible’s Picture Clue Read and Trace pages, a “hidden pictures” page, a maze, and a dot-to-dot.  The boys had fun playing with their Playmobil Ark set in the wading pool one day.

  

The highlight of our week was our visit to the Noah’s Ark exhibit at the Skirball Cultural Center, which is kind of combination of a children’s museum, an indoor playground, and a playhouse.  All three kids were entertained for the full two hours we were there.  We went on Thursday, which meant free admission, so the only cost was the gas to get there.  Woohoo!

  

  

  

Because we hadn’t paid for the exhibit, I splurged in the gift shop on a 200-piece Noah’s Ark puzzle.  It’s a little too challenging for Ian to do on his own, but it gave us a fun activity together, and since he really enjoys puzzles I know it’s one we’ll pull out again and again as he gets older.

  

Multimedia

As you can see in the picture above, while Ian and I “puzzled,” Elijah was busy on the computer playing with the Noah’s ark activity from Charlie Church Mouse Preschool.

The boys really enjoyed our “Listening Lesson” this week:

As a final note, I’ve discovered that I enjoy our homeschooling experience even more when I enter into our lessons and try to learn something myself.  This week I indulged myself with a little “biblical fiction.” A few years ago while browsing at the library I found a book called The Heavens Before by Kacy Barnett-Gramckow, which is set at the time of the Flood.  I remembered enjoying it so I decided to get the whole Genesis Trilogy to read on my Kindle.  It has caused me to think about the biblical account in new ways, which is one of the things I appreciate about this genre.  I’m already into the second book, which takes place at the time of the tower of Babel.  I have a few other favorites and newly discovered novels from the Genesis time period waiting for me when I finish these!

Posted in Bible lessons, Long Story Short, Preschool, The Gospel Story

Nature Study: Ocean Life

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One of the reasons I blog is to keep a record for myself of various resources we use when homeschooling.  I hadn’t planned on writing about our vacation this past week, but we ended up having so many great learning experiences I decided to go ahead and write them all down.  So to those of you who subscribe to my blog, forgive me if this post doesn’t apply to you in any way.  I just wanted a record for myself, and this is the easiest place for me to keep track of it.

We spent the week in Dana Point, California, courtesy of generous grandparents who gifted us a week at their timeshare.  (Thanks, Mom and Dad!)  It was just a 5 minute drive from the Dana Point Harbor, where we ended up going almost every day for various reasons, including the fabulous “Baby Beach” with plenty of waveless shallow water and super soft sand.

Ocean Institute

One of the first things we did was visit the Ocean Institute, which is only open to the public on weekends (they do school field trips during the week).  Although much of it was over the heads of our preschoolers, there was still plenty to interest them:

  • whale skeleton
  • a tank with a lobster that had just shed its shell (and a number of empty shells to look at in another room)
  • a squid dissection (They refused to touch it, but they watched me work with another dad and his son to do most of it.  I know Ian learned a lot because he kept bring up things we had talked about during the dissection.)
  • discovery pools where they could touch sea stars
  • tanks with fish
  • microscopes with slides of various things, including krill (We had to drag Ian away from these.)
  • a wave machine that showed how shifting tectonic plates can cause tsunamis
  • a remote controlled underwater vehicle with a camera that they could maneuver in a tank

Ian kept asking to go back all week, but we told him it would have to wait for another trip.

  

Books

I meant to get to the library before we left, but it didn’t happen.  I really wanted the boys to have some context for what were looking at when we went whalewatching, so when we visited the Ocean Institute gift shop I splurged more on new books than I normally would do.  I’m glad I did.  The boys really enjoyed the books I picked out, and we read them over and over again throughout the week.  I was really impressed by how much Ian gleaned from them and really understood.  Here’s what we added to our family library:

Whalewatching

There are a number of different companies to go out with, but a few of them had age restrictions, so we went with Dana Wharf, though we purchased half-price tickets from Goldstar rather than going through their website.  Elijah did get seasick (lesson learned: don’t go inside in choppy water!), but other than that we all had a great time.  We even got to spend a lot of time watching a blue whale, the largest animal God ever created.  I’ve been whalewatching in the past, but this was the first time I’ve seen a blue whale.  (They’ve only been coming around this area for about the last 7 years.)  We prepared Ian by talking through most of the K-2 pre-trip information from these curriculum packets for all ages/grades that a friend recommended.  (They have material for K-12.  The post-trip pages were a little advanced for Ian.)

  

Tidepools

Ian really enjoyed exploring the tidepools behind the Ocean Institute.  (Eric and I each carried a little one in an Ergo because Elijah wouldn’t have been able to climb on the rocks very well.)  I found some helpful information about the different things we saw here.  I wish I’d remembered my camera!

Worksheets

I initially went looking for a few coloring/activity sheets to take with us on the whalewatching trip in case the boys were bored stiff.  As I went searching, however, I decided to make each boy a little book about whales, dolphins, and tidepool animals that they could work on throughout the week.  There’s no shortage of coloring pages available on the web, so I won’t bother posting links to those.  I found a couple other fun resources, though, and I wanted to take note of them here:

  • Busy Bee Kids Printables: Ocean Animals theme (I loved that I could choose different levels of mazes, dot-to-dots, word searches, and more.  They even had extremely simple mazes that Elijah could do.)
  • Color Mountain: whales (When you click on a picture, you can choose various ways to use it–copywork, math sheets, wordsearches, and lots of other choice.  I just did plain coloring pages for Elijah and then used the same pictures with a simple sentence for Ian to trace.)

I really hadn’t planned on turning our vacation into school time, but as you can see, we had a busy week full of learning.  Next time I’d also like to spend some time at the  Doheny State Beach Visitor Center (it was under renovation) to visit their aquariums and tidepool.  We’ll definitely be back!

Posted in Nature Study

Long Story Short: Cain and Abel

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When we originally decided to use Long Story Short by Marty Machowski for both our family devotions and the basis for our Bible lessons, my mind automatically went into “school mode” and I scheduled regular breaks as I plotted the months up until Christmas, the first one being last week when we were heading off on vacation.  However, the boys have been so enthusiastic about Bible time every evening that Eric and I realized there was no real reason not to bring the book along with us and continue on.  The story for the week was on Cain and Abel, and it wasn’t exactly one I had a lot of “extras” planned for anyway.  So it was a lighter week, but here’s what we did.

In addition to the 5 nights of devotions in the book, we spent one night reading the story out of The Gospel Story Bible (also by Marty Machowski), and another night discussing Ephesians 4:26, which in the English Standard Version reads, “Be angry and do not sin; do not let the sun go down on your anger.”  I thought it was an important verse for us to discuss with our boys.  Even at their young ages, they struggle with how to respond to their anger appropriately.  From some of the books I’ve read on raising boys, this is going to be a constant battle as they grow up.  We had a really good talk that night.  I think it meant a lot to them to know that we acknowledged the way they feel toward each other at times, while helping them to learn how they should respond.  Cain may not have set a very good example, but sometimes we can learn best from other people’s mistakes.

Go-Along Books

The one book we read to go along with this story was Cain and Abel: Finding the Fruits of Peace by Sandy Eisenberg Sasso.  It expands on the biblical account by including some ideas from Hebrew midrash, and the illustrations are bold and colorful.

Reading Practice

Because we were away from home, I didn’t try to find any easy readers related to this story, but I did bring along word cards for our Bible memory verse so Ian could practice reading and both boys could work on memorizing Genesis 4:7.  I also set the words to the tune of “Are You Sleeping,” and after singing it a few times they had it down the first day:

Sin is crouching (sin is crouching) at the door (at the door)

It’s desire is for you, but you must rule over it. Genesis four verse seven

Bible Notebook

Have you watched any of the What’s in the Bible? DVDs?  They are a fabulous tool for teaching about the Bible!  Ian is just starting to get into them, so we watched Volume 1 – In the Beginning, which gives an overview of the structure of the Bible and starts teaching about Genesis.  When it talks about sin, it shows these funny little guys clinging to people’s backs.  I was a little unsure of that way of illustrating sin, but we talked about what sin really is, and when we discussed our memory verse it helped explain how to “rule over” sin.

When I taught the boys the memory verse I acted out each phrase, and when we got to that last part, we stomped our feet to show we were ruling over sin.  So for our Bible notebook page, it seemed appropriate to do a paint footprint.  We made “doors” out of construction paper that opened up on the footprint.

  

This verse made a big impression on the boys.  Every night Elijah has added, “Help me to rule over sin,” to his prayer, and Ian loves talking about how he should “stomp on sin.”

Multimedia

We didn’t spend as much time as usual on our “Listening Lesson” this week, but here’s what it contained:

The catechism questions left off on kind of a dark note, but we’ll get to the good news as we go along!

Posted in Bible lessons, Long Story Short, Preschool, The Gospel Story

We’re Going On a Bear Hunt

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We’ve been using Before Five in a Row for more than two years, but somehow we’ve only just now gotten to We’re Going On a Bear Hunt by Michael Rosen.  I know from the Five in a Row Forum that this is a favorite in many families, and now we can count ourselves among them.  The boys both had a lot of fun with this book, and they especially enjoyed a YouTube video of author Michael Rosen telling the story.  The production is as simple as it could be (just Rosen in front of a white background), but he is such an expressive storyteller, the boys were immediately drawn in and found the whole thing hilarious.  They watched it several times throughout the week.

We found a book at the library called We’re Going on a Book Hunt by Pat Miller, which the boys insisted on reading every time we read Bear Hunt.  It’s a cute story about a class going to the library and picking out books, but I didn’t enjoy it nearly as much as the boys.  Still, it was fun to see how the author copied the style of the original book.  There’s also a fun Dora the Explorer episode called “Berry Hunt” (Season 1, Episode 10 available streaming on Amazon Instant Video-free for Prime members) that follows a lot of the language from the story.

In addition to things in the Before Five in a Row manual (though we never got around to making a mud puddle, which I really wanted to do), we did a lot of extras from the Homeschool Creations printables, which I printed and laminated (along with a couple activities from other sources):

  • sort bears smallest to largest
  • memory match game

  

  • put caves in number order (Then I had him remove every other one and we talked about odd/even numbers.)

  

  • Bear hunt “board game” (having too much fun to take a picture)
  • pages in Ian’s workbook (which Elijah decided he was ready to try out)
  • sequencing cards from the lapbook at Homeschool Share

  

  • Graphing gummi bears using this free activity pack I found on Teachers Pay Teachers. Both boys did the first two pages (sorting and graphing), and then I also talked through the final page with Ian to have him read his graph and answer questions.

  

This was a great easy row for the week before we took off on vacation!

Posted in B4FIAR, Literature Units, Preschool
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