Books in our Christmas Reading Basket This Month:
Snitzel's Cookies by Jane Flory
Jesus and the Very Best Birthday by Sunny Griffin
Kitten's Christmas by Dick McCue
The Happy Snowman (a board book)
A Very Special Night by Gil Davies
Stopping by the Woods on a Snowy Evening by Robert Frost (FIAR)
Boxes for Katje by Candace Fleming (FIAR)
If you take a Mouse to the Movies by Laura Numeroff
The Christmas Miracle of Jonathan Toomey by Susan Wojciechowski
Grandma's Christmas Tree by Grandma Janet Mary
Disney's Winnie the Pooh's Night Before Christmas
Disney's Winnie the Pooh Jingle Bells


Pitty-pat found one of my cooking magazines with 101 cookies. All three kids "read" it today. Too cute. "Hey, Mom, Can you make this one it looks like a hamburger?"she asked. I guess they never saw a sandwich cookie before. Maybe this summer I will make scooter pies.but not now.

Bunny My honey

We just found my favorite Easter book at Walmart. I read this book over and over to Cam when she was little. We have lost or worn out many copies of this book through out the last 14 years. I was so happy to pick up a new copy last night. I look every Easter for a new one. I couldn't wait to give it to her so when everyone else had gone to bed I gave it to her. She smiled as she read it. After she had went downstairs I looked for the book to put it away but she had taken it with her to bed. I guess you are never too old for your favorite bedtime story.

Reading

Pitty-pat is reading the Magic Tree House books, with lots of help and encouragement! Hurray reading has been such a battle with her.

Another book list

As you know I am really into books and so I am once again comparing my home library to a recommended reading book list this time it is Charlotte Mason. I wonder how many of these books we already own. After all another trip to the used book store is in my future this Sunday! I found the list here.

3 Years Old	4 Years Old	5 Years Old
Good Dog, Carl; Carl’s Afternoon in the Park; Carl’s Masquerade; Carl Goes Shopping; Carl’s Birthday; Carl’s Sleepy Afternoon; Stranger in the Woods; Lost in the Woods; Millions of Cats; Caps for Sale; The Very Hungry Caterpillar (and others by Eric Carle); The Very Best Home for Me; Corduroy; A Pocket for Corduroy; Swimmy; Harry the Dirty Dog; Harry by the Sea; No Roses for Harry; Little Book of Poems (poetry); Billy’s Picture; Harold and the Purple Crayon; Home for a Bunny; Katy No-Pocket; Kitty’s New Doll; McDuff Moves In; McDuff Comes Home; McDuff and the Baby; McDuff’s Wild Romp; Pretzel; The Poky Little Puppy; Polite Elephant; The Saggy, Baggy Elephant; The Shy Little Kitten	Whistle for Willie; The Little House; Mike Mulligan and His Steam Shovel; Norman the Doorman; Pet of the Met; The Ox-Cart Man; Make Way for Ducklings; Burt Down, Deep-Water Man; Blueberries for Sal; One Morning in Maine; Time of Wonder; Lentil; The Story of Ferdinand; A New Coat for Anna; When We Were Very Young (poetry); Jeremy: The Tale of an Honest Bunny; Bearymore; Chester the Worldly Pig; The Giving Tree; Gregory’s Shadow; Little Toot; Raggedy Ann Stories; Raggedy Andy Stories; The Ugly Duckling; The Taxi That Hurried; Tootle; Tale of Peter Rabbit (and others by Beatrix Potter); God’s Wisdom for Little Girls OR God’s Wisdom for Little Boys	Miss Rumphius; James Herriot’s Treasury for Children; Katie Meets the Impressionists; Katie and the Mona Lisa; Katie and the Sunflowers; The Biggest Bear; Thy Friend, Obadiah; Imogene’s Antlers; Now We Are Six (poetry); The Magic Hill; Little House in the Big Woods; Little House on the Prairie; Farmer Boy; On the Banks of Plum Creek; By the Shores of Silver Lake; The Long Winter; Little Town on the Prairie; These Happy Golden Years

Trip to the used book store

I had to work 3p-11p on call to day so I went to the used bookstore. I found 4 great used books. I spy little letters by Jean Marzollo, ($2.95) a board book for little-man, President George Washington by David A. Adler ($2.95), The Night Before Christmas, illustrated by Jan Brett for ($2.95), and Hiawatha, by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and illustrated by Susan Jeffers for ($1.95). I love books. I do not own a nook. I really haven't even used my laptop to read a book I could find in print. Little-man loves board books. We just this week converted the closet in the boy's room into a reading nook. It has pillows and what else of course...lots of board books. My favorite way to find books is at garage sales($0.10-$1.00) but the used book store is a close second. This is because both the book store in my town and the next town have went out of business. The town I work in has a Barnes and Noble which I love but I can buy more books if I buy them used. I am already looking for copies of certain board books for my grandson arriving soon in Feb. since I can never seem to part with a book. It was odd that I have sent several to Aimee. Jessica came and took "hers" and that was hard for me. I do not like to part with my books. Some day I want to donate them in mass to create a library in Salt River at the WMFC (after I am dead of course). Since there isn't a good library there and the kids need books to keep them out of trouble. In the mean time these are great additions to my personal library. In November we will be studying American Indians this year so the poem Hiawatha is perfect for that study. I love Christmas and anything Jan Brett is a work of art. George Washington is a great history book for next Feb. since we did Abe Lincoln again this year. And Little man is working on his ABC's so I spy book will be perfect for him.

progress

Tippy-toe read three more BOB books today. Then while little-man took his nap, Tippy-toe, Pitty-pat and I did the "Smithsonian rock and gem dig" activity I paid $9.99 for at Meijer. DO NOT BUY IT! It is a rip-off! The 11 rock and gems are not even the size of my pinky fingernail! The tiny magnifying glass that comes with it can't even pick them up. I was really disappointed. The stones were way too small to identify and nothing I would add to our collection! Don't waste your time or money on them. The only good thing is they did sweep the floor for me afterwards because of the sandy mess.The poster inside wasn't even anything we could use either. I must say Tippy-toe did enjoy digging them out.

reading

I bought Tippy-toes a set of BOB Books.  He read his first book and is so proud of himself! I love to hear him brag how he reads now. This was so much fun for me too. The set was worth every penny of the $16.95 it cost me at the teacher's store in Midland. This is our goal for this weekend to read the whole set more than once together.

What's on my bookshelf?

I am rereading the first book I ever read about Homeschooling. Home Grown Kids by Dr Raymond and Dorothy Moore, I borrowed it from the library. It has a foreword by Dr James Dobson.This is the book that taught me the most about parenting and homeschooling! Now that I am doing this for the second time around I thought I should reread the book.

chick day 3

Today we worked on our ABC's letter review again I drew capital and small letters on bottle caps and they had to match the charts made from coconut abc trees I found here. Pitty pat aced hers, Tippy toe missed three now I know where he needs more work, and Litttle-man needed a partner for the whole game of course. I also made a set for a friend's son who is four. Great file folder game! So much learning fun. I have really come to enjoy this book and unit study. Such good testing and review of the basics.

Chicka Chicka Boom Boom day 2

Today I gave Pitty-pat the book, magnetic letters, and a plastic coconut then told her she was today's teacher!  No other instructions.What fun watching how they "Played" school. She hates to read but has to read the story to be the teacher LOL! Tricky mom! Tippy-toe said lets spell words from the book with our letters. Now I got my reluctant speller and pre-reader working away all on his own! Tricky mom! I think I am going to find this book making my favorites list rather quickly! Littleman also enjoyed being  a student in Pitty-pat's class.

Chicka Chicka Boom Boom

We are reading this week Chicka Chicka Boom Boom. We opened a real coconut and tasted it. The kids learned about palm trees. Did you know one tree can produce up to 100 coconuts a year? The kids loved store bought toasted coconut better than the real raw coconut. They got to touch the coconut shell.We have a chicka boom sensory bin for littleman. It has sand, magnetic letters, a sand sieve,wooden coconut trees, a wooden sun,brown buttons, and monkey erasers. I think he'll enjoy sifting the letters out of the sand. It's a good review for the older kids and learning for littleman.

Barnes and noble free books summer reading program

http://img1.imagesbn.com/pImages/kids/summerreading/2011/BN-Tear-Pad.pdf
There is the link to Barnes and nobles summer reading program reading journal. got to love free books! here is the page that explains the program.

Book it!

 Pizza Hut Book it! Homeschool enrollment starts May 1st, 2011--
http://www.bookitprogram.com/Enrollment/homeschool.asp

Have you read these books?

Copy and paste then bold the books you have read. See how you compare. The original post can be found here. I saw it on this blog and had to see how wrong the BBC is about me!
The BBC apparently believes most people will have only read 6 of the 100 books here:

1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen

2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien

3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte

4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling

5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
6 The Bible
7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell
9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman
10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens
11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott
12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare - read all
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulk
18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger
19 The Time Traveller’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger
20 Middlemarch - George Eliot
21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell
22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald
23 Bleak House - Charles Dickens
24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams
26 Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh
27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll
30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame
31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis
34 Emma - Jane Austen
35 Persuasion - Jane Austen
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe
37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres
39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden
40 Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne
41 Animal Farm - George Orwell
42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney - John Irving
45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
46 Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery
47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy.
48 The Handmaid’s Tale - Margaret Atwood
49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding
50 Atonement - Ian McEwan
51 Life of Pi - Yann Martel
52 Dune - Frank Herbert
53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons
54 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen 
55 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth.
56 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57 A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens
58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck
62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt
64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold
65 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas
66 On The Road - Jack Kerouac
67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
68 Bridget Jones’s Diary - Helen Fielding
69 Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie
70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville
71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens
72 Dracula - Bram Stoker
73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett
74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson
75 Ulysses - James Joyce
76 The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath
77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome
78 Germinal - Emile Zola
79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray
80 Possession - AS Byatt.
81 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens
82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
83 The Color Purple - Alice Walker
84 The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro
85 Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
86 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
87 Charlotte’s Web - EB White
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
90 The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton
91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad
92 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery
93 The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
94 Watership Down - Richard Adams
95 A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole
96 A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute
97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas
98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl
100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo 
I have read all but 26 and my computer will not let me bold any of them I have read for some reason.But the ones I have not read are the most recent ones. Probably because I was so busy starting a career and raising my oldest kids to read those.

Hot Find at Kohls, Family movie night

• I went today to pick up a new copy of The Very Hungry Caterpillar and bought four  Eric Carle books and The  Very Hungry Caterpillar --24 piece puzzle for $24.90 What a great find the books are just $5.00 each! Each of the kids is getting one for Easter. I am looking up activities to go with the book there  are so many it is hard to choose.

• We had family movie night tonight popcorn and Tangled. We have been waiting for it to come out on DVD. I read a version of Rapunzel to the kids and did activities to go along earlier when the previews first came out. It wasn't what I planned to do tonight but Aaron brought it home for the kids.

• I set up some Egg related activities for this weekend.  We should be more productive then.

He can read!

Tippy-toe is reading sight words! I printed out a couple of see,say,write and read worksheets from tls books. He is so proud of himself recognizing the words-bunny, hat, see, in, the, I. We put them in a index card spiral so he can practice them. He just beamed from ear to ear! I am going to find more of these style sheets for him to work on. Everything just clicked for him today. He has been wanting to read for awhile now. I haven't pushed him (because of the biological family history of dyslexia). I wanted him to be mature enough to not get frustrated if it wasn't easy. Today it came easy! I am so proud of him. Then he knew a word Pitty-pat didn't recognize--Bunny. Boy did his buttons pop. He felt so proud of himself. I was so happy for him. This reading stuff has been the hardest subject for me to teach. As I said before I was four years old when I started to read so I don't remember HOW I learned to read. It has made teaching reading difficult for me to do. By the time  I was four I could read the newspaper without help. I have always loved to read. I read to my kids everyday if I can. I read the books my older kids bring home so we have something in common to talk about together. So reading is very important in my home. Little man has his own library of board books. He loves his books. I am so happy about today.

Ireland Lapbooks

For March we are doing Ireland lapbooks. The kids are excited to get started. We took a week off because of Trent's graduation and Aaron and I visiting Columbia,SC. While on vacation I found some Irish money to use with our unit study. I also found a board book copy of Mike Mulligan and his Steam Shovel and started reading it to the boys at bedtime last night. I remember reading it to myself when I was Tippy-toes age or a little younger.

Book list 2011

This post will be for listing all the books we read in 2011. It will be an on going record for the year and hopefully updated regularly.
Mom's list
(You will see many simularities between lists as I try to read everything my kids read and read to the little ones as well.)
1. Wolves of the Beyond by Katheryn Lasky This is set in the same realm as the Guardians of Ga'hoole series that Aimee and I read together. ISBN#978-0-545-23331. Cam checked this out from school and we both read it today.



Cam's list ( girl-age 12)
1. Wolves of the Beyond by Katheryn Lasky this is set in the same realm as the Guardians of Ga'hoole series. ISBN#978-0-545-23331. She checked this out from the library at school .

Pitty-pat's List
Tippy-toe's List
Little-man's List

January is for Jan Brett

We are reading The Mitten , an Ulkranian fold tale Illustrated by Jan Brett. Little man got the board book version for christmas. Even though we have done this book last year it is worth repeating again for little-man along with  all the rest of us. I have printed out on tag  board from Jan Brett's website this neat mitten and all the animals for a sequencing activity. I will back the animals with sand paper for flannel board use. After we did the story last year I found sandy lion stickers with all the animals so this year we will make our own bookmarks. Pitty-pat can practice reading aloud using this book. I am sure she would like a break from Little house in the Big Woods. In 2010 we studied bears and used this as a tie in to a hibernation unit study  and animal tracks in the snow, we will test for learning retention by reviewing these with Pitty-pat and Tippy-toe. This fall we studied owls and Cam got the Guardians of Ga'hoole movie for christmas so we can watch the movie as part of our Owl study. I am making a winter words board for spelling and reading practice. Over all a simple unit study to ease back into the school routine again.

What are we reading?

Little-man loves books all of a sudden. He has to carry one around. His night time favorite is Time for Bed by Mem Fox and illustrated by Jane Dyer. He just loves animals. Daddy has been teaching him to say all the animal sounds. I have to watch him though he is rather hard on even the board books.

Tippy-toe and Pitty-pat enjoy fairy tales and since Tangled the disney movie comes out soon I have been reading this pre Brothers Grim version of Rapunzel. We just lucked into it with the boxes of books we were given.