Non-Fiction Monday: What’s in the Tide Pool?

What’s in the Tide Pool? by Anne Hunter does a wonderful job of simply describing common creature found in tide pools on a rocky shore.  C kept it in her bed for several days, looking through the pictures, and she can name all the creatures.  We’ve used it for reference several times during our tide [...]

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A Day in the Life

I love reading day-in-the-life posts, and I haven’t done one in awhile so yesterday, I made notes throughout the day and fleshed them out today during C’s nap.  M has met all the first grade learning goals that I set so we’re taking it easy this week, focusing mainly on art and our tidepool study. [...]

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Watercolor Resist Chamelons

I saw this chameleon project at Art Projects for Kids, one of my favorite art blogs, and I knew it would be perfect for our art group.  We checked out the suggested accompanying book, The Mixed-Up Chameleon by Eric Carle and two other chameleon-themed favorites of M’s, A Color of His Own by Leo Lioni [...]

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Non-Fiction Monday: On Beyond A Million

“1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10″ “Hey, whatcha doing?” “Counting.” “I can count faster than that.” “I don’t know.  I can count pretty fast.  I can even count by 10s. 10, 20, 30, 40″ “But can you power count?” “Power count?  What’s that?” “10, 100, 1000, 10,000, 100,000, 1,000,000″ “Wait a [...]

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What We’re Reading This Week, May 22

I’m still trying to shake the lasts sniffles and coughing and generally recover our household from my being sick this week.  I have many blog posts started in my mind about art projects we’ve been doing, science experiments, more thoughts on teaching math, etc.  But I am enjoying a relaxing day out on my own [...]

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Inspirations for Summer Reading

I was quite flat this weekend, struck down by a nasty virus that had me convinced I had strep.  I was just coming out of my sickness haze yesterday so I missed Non-Fiction Monday, but I wanted to send everyone to Rasco from RIF’s wonderful Round-Up focusing on books that would encourage summer reading. Family [...]

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Farm Themed Picture Books

We’re going to be focusing on farms over the next few week with C so I’ve started pulling together some of our favorite farm-themed books. I hadn’t realized how many farm books we owned or how many titles a search would generate.  You’ll certainly have no problem finding plenty of books about farms, but here [...]

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Prehistory and Evolution Booklist, Part 4

In the last few weeks of our prehistory study, we reviewed everything we’ve learned by focusing on archaeology, fossils, Charles Darwin, and the process of evolution. Here are the books we used: Archaeologists Dig for Clues by Kate Duke Fossils Tell of Long Ago by Aliki DK Eyewitness Fossil You can read more about these [...]

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Rethinking Math, Part 2

You can find Part 1 here. A great series of books that put math into a real world context and suggest activities is Math Starts by Stuart J. Murphy.  There are 3 levels of books for kids in preschool through elementary school.  The website also includes activities for each book. We read several of the [...]

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Non-Fiction Monday: Take A Beach Walk

I discovered the Take A Walk series while looking through the Winter Promise catalog, and I knew right away that I wanted to order Take A Beach Walk by Jane Kirkland for us to use as we study tidepools and shore creatures. The book contains information about birds, crustaceans, mollusks, and other creatures you might [...]

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