Book Review: The Long Way to a New Land

I don't use Sonlight as our primary curriculum any longer, but I continue to value and respect their reading choices. This one is a repeat for Zach and me, new to Noah and Lily. The Long Way to a New Land is of the series, "An I Can Read Book." On the back, suggested age is to 4 to 8, and I believe that is quite accurate, on the upper ages the child reading independently and on the lower ages as a read-aloud by the parent. The family in the book leaves a bleak existence in Sweden for new hope in America, based on a letter of encouragement from relatives who already had made the treacherous journey across the ocean. We follow the family through the journey, ending the book at arrival in the new land. For those interested, this family's saga continues in "The Long Way Westward." The pictures in Long Way to a New Land are dark blacks and grays, very little color, obviously suggesting the gray existence of the family. Unfortunately, it also means they are not easily seen, nor interesting, to the child reading the book or being read to. This is unfortunate, as it seemingly takes away some of the enjoyment of the book for the child, at least my children. I have used this twice now with 1st graders. The story itself is somber without being depressing, and interesting without being too long or detailed for a young child. I continue to think this is a good resource for the younger ones studying immigration to America during the early 19th century.

Book review: Cora Frear

This is used in Sonlight curriculum. It is a great fit for any US history/pioneer period study. I typically use it with my 1st grade kids, but my older and younger are interested too. Cora is a little girl who helps her dad, a doctor. On the way to a patient in their buggy, they get caught in a prairie fire. Cora is key in saving them, but I'll leave the rest a surprise. What is especially nice is this is based on a true figure in history, and of course female heroines are great as there are not quite so many books written starring a female for kids to admire. It is good for probably 2-3rd grade and above to read alone, or as a read-aloud down to even pre-K age.

Note it is part of the Brave Kids series, and we just put another of these on our library holds list as this one has been such a hit here.

Review: What's Smaller Than a Pygmy Shrew?

The book opens describing the size of a pygmy shrew relative to an elephant, then relative to a ladybug, and proceeds smaller and smaller, each smaller item compared to a new even smaller item down to atoms, quarks and electrons. The book wraps up by describing how everything in the entire universe is made up of atoms. This book dovetails nicely, by the way, with another of this author's books, Is a Blue Whale the Biggest Thing There Is?.

Suggested age range for this book is 4-8 yrs. I used this with boys ages 8 and 5. The 5yo grasped some of the concepts, but really a lot of it was over his head as he could just not grasp it totally. The 8yo was much more enthralled with the whole idea, having used a microscope before and really understanding it better. It is one of the most user friendly books I have found though to put it in a true real world perspective, as most science texts simply start with what an atom is without really trying to explain how incredibly tiny that is.

We thoroughly enjoyed this book, even mom as a refresher, before starting in on our basic chemistry textbook for my 3rd grader. :) My kindergartener will stop here with this brief intro, and is enjoying paging through the pictures again and again.

And, by the way, I'm not paid at all for my review. I am just sharing a book we liked! :)

Review: Is a Blue Whale the Biggest Thing There Is?

Today we had the pleasure of reading Is a Blue Whale the Biggest Thing There Is? by Robert Wells. And by the way, this is not a paid review, nor did we receive the book free or anything. I review this simply because I want to share a great book! :)

This selection is part Sonlight's P4/5 core curriculum which we use for Noah right now.

It is a slim little book, a nicely illustrated picture on each and every page, and an amount of text appropriate for a preschool attention span. It begins by showing the relative size of a blue whale to other common animals (elephant, lion). With that as a jump point, each page takes us progressively larger relative to the current topic, from whales, to mountains, to planets, to suns, stars, on and on until we reach the size of the galaxy. So a hard to grasp concept of a galaxy's size is broken down into bite-sized pieces. This is a perfect introduction to comparative sizes, concepts of millions and billions (great intro to that on the first page) and brief astronomy for a young child.

This is geared towards ages 4-8. Based on our experiences today, I would say that is pretty accurate. Noah is 5 now and enjoyed it, getting a lot out of it but not grasping it 100%. The pictures were engaging, and the text was approachable for his understanding level. His attention stayed put through the book. Zach is 8 now, and enjoyed it as well, listening to me read it and then grabbing it for a second read on his own, completely grasping the content and staring in wonder. He has a much firmer grasp on just how unimaginatively big a galaxy is after this book. The astronomy of course was more of a review for him, but that is great too, as we are off to build on that for him later on with more in depth astronomy, while Noah will stop here...

Book: Pompeii: Lost and Found by Mary Pope Osborne

Zach and I just finished up reading Pompeii: Lost and Found by Mary Pope Osborne. I found it just browsing the history section in the library for him. What a treasure this little book turned out to be. We are finishing up Rome in our Sonlight core 1 and I wanted to cover Pompeii a little more. He had read in his readers a children's paperback about Pompeii, but that was months back. I needed to refresh his memory a bit. This Osborne book is a nonfiction storybook, large size, with nicely done illustrations on each page, and not an overwhelming amount of text, making it perfect as a quick review or adjunct to another more meaty history book covering the topic. The illustrations are "fresco style," meaning they appear in the style of what fresco paintings would look like at the time, on the walls of the villas. I thought that was a particularly nice touch. The book opens and closes with the archeological find, thus framing the story for the kids into the past, and reiterating it as a true historical account rather than just a story. It also goes beyond the bare basics of the destruction of Pompeii, discussing also the culture and times of Rome briefly, one topic per two-page spread in the book. It does not gloss over the fact that the entire town died, but it did it in a considerate way, I think. That can be a rough topic for some particularly sensitive kids that age. This is a great book on Pompeii, appropriate for lower elementary students. It went very nicely with our last weeks of Sonlight core 1.

Legend of the Candy Cane unit study and lapbook

The kids and I are continuing on with Sonlight core 1 and P3/4 but we wanted something a little bit festive to add on for the holidays. I saw the Legend of the Candy Cane free unit study and lapbook recommended on the Sonlight forums, and it seemed just the thing. I printed out a lot of the materials there, and we started on it yesterday. What fun! Zach especially is loving it and doing the entire thing pretty much. I scaled it down with some extra cut/paste and coloring for Lily and Noah to do their own versions at their own level but still have something that looks like Zach's "big guy" lapbook. We aren't done quite yet, but we are having a great time. I also didn't know where candy canes originated, so it's fun for me too. If we get the time (and mom has the energy), we will be making our own candy canes too later on. The recipe is on the linked site.

Book Review: Follow My Leader by James Garfield

Zach and I read this booktogether, my reading it aloud to him and then he chose to read it again himself. As I was reading, this was one of those where he always asked for another chapter, more. The book features, Jimmy, a typical preteen boy, who is blinded by an accident involving a peer. The rest of the book describes his journey through approximately the next year, as he struggles to deal with both the realities of being blind and the emotions surrounding it. So many children's books do not do adequate character development, and even kids can pick up on that. This character is very real, with realistic emotions, weaknesses, strengths and fears. The other characters, particularly his peers, are also fairly developed. Jimmy in the story receives a guide dog, which I understand would not actually occur in someone his age (that young is not allowed a trained guide dog). However, the story makes the event seem plausible and realistic. Topics explored included blindness, Braille language, guide dogs, how peers may treat a blind student and, a very big one, forgiveness and hatred, and what those feelings can do to a person if not adequately dealt with. These are big topics for little readers, but the book does an admirable job with them. The book is also a great discussion starter for going further in depth with any of those topics and more. We highly recommend it.

The Year of Miss Agnes - Review

Zach and I read the Year of Miss Agnes by Kirkpatrick Hill as part of his core 1 Sonlight curriculum. Yet again Sonlight came through for us and picked a winner. Zach loved it, and I enjoyed reading it with him.

In the novel, our main character is a little girl growing up in a remote Alaskan Indian village. In the first pages, we see yet another teacher in their one-room schoolhouse has quit, but not before insulting the children and expressing her disgust at their culture and customs (such as eating lots of fish). There is apprehension as they wait to see who will be next to teach them. Fortunately, that "who" is Miss Agnes. She brings with her fresh ideas, shelves the old books and opens up a whole new world of thoughts and ideas to the children, inspiring not only the children but the parents to shift some of their ideas. A strong theme in the book is who needs school and how much, including teaching of the deaf, schooling beyond the basic (college) and attitudes towards schooling in a native culture. I won't spoil the ending for you, but suffice to say it leaves open a nice discussion and some thought. My son still likes to come up to me (weeks later) and discuss this novel.

Exploring Ancient Greece and Greek Mythology

In our Sonlight core 1 right now we are deep into ancient Greece and Greek Mythology. What fun Zach and I have been having with this!

I actually got very lucky in that Zach picked up from the bookstore over the summer a fiction book that has a mythology theme, The Lightning Thief (Percy Jackson and the Olympians, Book 1), which is part of a series. He has since went on to read the next couple in the series, and loved those as well. If you have an advanced reader and are doing mythology, those may be very fun for you as well, to do a comparison of where the author got the characters, how much is "factual" (well, at least an accurate rendition of the mytho), and how much is Riordan's own imagination and expansion of the character and so forth.

In the free realm, the internet is, of course, full of facts, games, websites, "educational" material (some yes, some no) and everything else you could want about Greek Myths. I did some major searching last week for a few select sites for Zach to explore. He loves the computer, and loves games. I wanted to connect that love of the computer with some reinforcement with what we were learning. One site I found that I really liked for content and style, and Zach really liked for the fun factor was Adventures in Ancient Greece. It has too much content for me to list it all, but it had a god/goddess Greek/Roman name matching with what they oversaw, a nice map, exploration of different areas and a quiz at the end where Zach had great fun proving how much he knew, with no prompting by me to take the quiz. :)

And right now both boys (ages 7 and 4) are deeply engrossed in a mythology audio CD Greek Myths, thus giving me the time to write this post. LOL. We all love Jim Weiss. We have seen and heard him in person each year now for 3 or 4 years at the California Homeschool Network Family Expo in Ontario, California. He is such a fantastic storyteller, and we have purchased several of his CDs. I really can't recommmend them highly enough, highly educational and highly entertaining. Our minivan always has a few stashed, and usually one in the CD player.

Back to some more interactive schooling for Zach and I as his CD winds up, but I wanted to share these resources, as I benefit greatly from all the blogs and posts of other homeschoolers sharing tips and sites with me to make education really come alive for students.

Book Review: Mountain Born by Elizabeth Yates

This is another gem of a book Zach and I read together as part of our Sonlight Core 1 curriculum. I have to admit, yet again, that I probably would not have chosen it randomly from the book store shelves. In fact, in the start of it, I was worried Zach would not enjoy it due to the vocabulary and content.

The content involves a boy, Peter, who lived in the past (specific dates not given in the book), in a remote mountainous area, on the outskirts of a village apparently. Peter's family is a farming family, primarily involved in raising sheep. The entire story revolves around Peter and his relationship with his cosset, Biddy. Now my own son is a city boy who has never been really close to a sheep honestly, and the farming life is completely unknown to him. He is drawn to action-packed tales of detectives, robots and sci-fi adventures. So you can guess I was hesitant about this book. However, the simple story of a boy and his pet easily transcended the differences between Zach and Peter, and Zach sat enthralled day after day as we read this book aloud together.

Which brings me to the other point about this book, the vocabulary. It is a rich, complex book in terms of both the word choices and the syntax. Sonlight made a good choice to make this a read-aloud rather than leaving it to the student to read on his/her own. We stopped often during the story to explain the meaning of a word, or to reread a passage if I saw he was looking a bit confused. The exposure to this language was wonderful though, and added many words to his vocabulary that he would not have normally encountered, even in his spelling words or workbooks.

So, I have to give this book a high recommendation from boy my son and myself. It is a lovely book to read together.

We enjoyed this selection so much in fact, that we requested from the library, A Place for Peter, which is the sequel to Mountain Born. In the sequel, Peter is older now, and is struggling through that difficult period between being a boy and a man. The writing is as good as Mountain Born, but the story is not quite as engaging to Zach at this period in his life. It is a nice followup though; we love to continue on with series we enjoyed together.

A cute note about A Place for Peter is I did get it from the library here, and there was only one copy in the system in storage at Central Library. We had it sent up to our local brand and picked it up. It didn't even have a call number, just "storage" on the spine. It still has the old envelope for the check-out card, on which is printed library rules, including a note of a 4 cent per day overdue fee, or 2 cents per day for juvenile books. LOL I tried to find a date it was put into the library system, and apparently it was Nov 24, 1952 by stamp, and the copyright on this edition is 1952. What a neat treat to hold this old book and think of all those who have read it before us.

Review: Gooney Bird Greene

We are still working along on Sonlight Core 1 with Zach. This week we finished up Gooney Bird Greene by Lois Lowry. I was a little worried honestly about this one. First of all it has a picture of a little girl on the front in a pink tutu. That just isn't a cover that catches Zach's attention honestly. Thankfully though, it was a read-aloud rather than a reader, and hence he didn't have a choice.

It started a little slow and seemed a little bland in the first part. Zach, however, did start to enjoy it rather quickly, enjoying the funny tales Gooney Bird had to tell. He seemed to easily find the humor in the wording, and grasp why it was funny.

I honestly still didn't particularly like it through the middle of the book. This book is better for an independent reader than a read-aloud, as is scheduled in Sonlight. I can perhaps see why it is scheduled as a read-aloud, as the parent can be sure the student fully grasps the humor and why, and perhaps use it is a leap-off discussion of how to write a good story. However, the font changes and so forth that are used to indicate to the reader that what is a "Gooney Bird Story" from regular text are completely lost when done orally. That alone made it a bit of a problem for a read-aloud.

By the end of the story, I too was sad to see it end though. Zach, and even Noah, were enjoying the book. As it wrapped up, I really saw it's value as we read the last chapter. That chapter talks about how each of us has stories to tell and how to find them, using specific concrete examples from the stories Gooney has already told so well. So, a young reader is left with the message that he/she has stories in her own life to tell, and reminded that there are specific storytelling techniques to utilize that will make it the most interesting it can be for the audience. That is a great message to leave with the reader.

Now that we have read it as scheduled, my own independent reader will get a chance to reread it and see the written techniques used as well. He loves to reread, thankfully. I'm very glad we had exposure to this through our curriculum, because honestly I would not have picked it out for my son, nor would he have chosen it for himself, based on the cover art or description on the cover. It really was an excellent book though.

We LOVE Diamond Notes

Yep, Zach and I love Diamond Notes. Some of you are probably scratching your head at this point, right? What in the world is she talking about? Diamond Notes are part of our Sonlight curriculum, part of the language arts specifically. Diamond Notes can be seen on the Sonlight website, and probably purchased separately and can stand alone even if you don't use the rest of Sonlight. There are sample pages on the Sonlight website too so you can see what I'm talking about.

Basically it is for students to learn to write paragraphs. When I was in school I still recall we were supposed to do a topic sentence, blah, blah, blah. Well, you still need to do that, but diamond notes gives excellent visuals of a baseball diamond (hence the name Diamond Notes) to fill in first, sort of a brainstorming schematic. From there the student goes to separate sentences based on his baseball diamond. And from there he or she takes those separate sentences and forms the paragraph. The entire Diamond Notes program takes 5 weeks at 2-3 days a week. And it is miraculous for my kid who is ADHD and really has trouble organizing his thoughts coherently to write a paragraph. I really can't say enough good things about it.

So, if you are a parent trying to teach your child to do more coherent and concise paragraphs, this may be what you are looking for. Take a look! :)

Today, Zach and I had the pleasure of delving into a new book, If the World Were a Village: A Book about the World's People, written by David J. Smith.

Even adults have trouble grasping the enormity of the population of the entire world as a number and attempting to envision how many that really is, then applying abstract and dehumanized percentages of how many people live where and so forth to that original unimaginable number. I had come across the natural concept of reducing that population number to 100 and then using the percentages as people. So, if the number to imagine was 1%, then 1 person in that 100 would do whatever it was.

This book, I feel, does a particularly nice job of presenting this information to children. It is a larger format, with wonderful illustrations (done by Shelagh Armstrong). The 1st page of the book sets the stage, encouraging us to travel into our mind to the "global village" of 100 people. Then, each 2-page spread in the book covers another topic, including "nationalities," "languages" and so forth, leading up to "the village in the past" and the "village in the future," meaning in this case population growth and issues regarding that. They do, by the way, make a quick note that scientists do disagree with some of the population growth numbers they present.

Zach was really engaged in this book, with wide eyes at the some of the facts presented, though honestly it wasn't new information. It really seemed to speak to him in a language he could grasp though, especially the pages on "air and water" (focus on pollution) and "food" (again, focus on how many in our world go hungry each day).

We use a religious homeschool curriculum and these topics do come up often in the sense of social justice. Honestly what is nice about this book is that it is NOT presented from a Christian perspective, thereby giving it a wider appeal, and allowing of course use in the classroom. It is presented in a quite factual and matter of fact tone, while still engaging the reader into some reflection about the meaning.

For the parent or teacher, there is a nice 2-page spread of suggestions for teaching children about the global village, or world, beyond this book.

In browsing online, I did see this interesting information on the author's website, including further links and activities, including several geared directly towards teachers and parents.

Only note I would make to those of you interested, is that the author is very very concerned about population growth and population control, so if these are issues where you tend to disagree with many scientists, you might want to view the author's website and position before you order the book for your children. I found the information to be emphasized in the book, but I also found it to be presented in a factual rather than a preachy manner for what it's worth.

As I said, we quite enjoyed the book as an addition to expand our core 1 studies for Sonlight, which is titled "Intro to World History." We worked on the Usborne Book of Peoples of the World this morning in our curriculum reading, and this was a very nice adjunct to that.

The Doodle Pro helps in spelling.

I don't know why this one didn't occur to us before now honestly. Today we were going over spelling words, day 1, meaning that we were looking them over for the first time. The suggestions in our Sonlight IG include having the child write them at first on a blackboard or dry erase board, etc., as kids love the large movements. Plus, from my own experience, it would likely just add some fun to spelling as kids love white erase boards! In any case, we don't have one in our school area, aka, the family room. But this morning my eyes landed on a discarded Doodle Pro lying on the carpet. Aha! Zach LOVED writing out his words on his Doodle Pro. It is the little things in life that add up to a fun day for him, so I'm sharing this tiny tip to anyone who has a Doodle Pro or similar item and wants to give it a go on the spelling.

We are done with Core K!!

Just today we finally finished up Sonlight Core K, a couple months delayed from our ideal end date. We had some setbacks, a new baby and so forth. What a great time we had doing it though, and I highly recommend Sonlight for homeschooling. We skipped parts of some of the books, most notably in Hero Tales, but overall the books were loved and enjoyed thoroughly for the great literature they are, timeless classics.

Now on to core 1, woohoo! We are also doing the new P3/4 core for Noah, and that is fun in its own right, though we have already discarded the Bible Stories book it came with, as that was far advanced for the age group and not interesting at all to him. We replaced it with an easier Bible Stories book and are thoroughly enjoying the other selections. Noah is quite proud that he too has special school books!

Sonlight new stupidity

Those of you who read my blog probably know we use Sonlight for our curriculum. To be honest, I'm really really rethinking that and it has very little to do with the actual curriculum. My hesitation began when when they changed their forums a couple years ago from being open to having to pay for them unless you bought X dollars in merchandise each year basically. I think they shot themselves directly in the foot on that one. I personally visited their forums because they were a vibrant community, full of advice and chatter regarding homeschooling. Um, let's just say they are not as active now, but still some decent threads so I visit periodically.

Oh, and let's not forget that even if you spend $150 or whatever it is for your curriculum and board access you have to pay if you want to sell used curriculum on their, a monthly fee. Nope, sorry. I'll sell anything I have locally or other (multiple) free sites.

Now you may say it costs them server usage, bandwidth and of course the used curriculum takes away from people buying new, right? That is true, there is a cost to them. However, I would have never started on Sonlight at all if I hadn't chatted with ladies on the forum (back when it was free), who encouraged me with their wonderful advice on how wonderful Sonlight was working for their families. Sonlight has lost a lot of word of mouth advertising by closing the forum to general population, and word of mouth advertising is hard to beat.

Then today I go to log in and change my board signature to update the ages of my kids and learn that nobody can put links in their signature that are clickable. Hell, let's just all go back to the dark ages and forget the internet!! On searching the boards I can see it is a new change but not why. I presume so people can't advertise or what?! I have my blog link in my sig, and I LOVED visiting other blogs of moms from the boards. If I read an interesting post, well thought out or just interesting, I would often check their sig to see if they had a blog in there and browse it. I seriously doubt I will be copying and pasting titles (you can still put text in your sig just not links) and hunting for blogs.

So, Sonlight, you just gave me a very very good reason to visit your forum even less now. I guess I should look on the bright side - I'll save lots of money because I won't be tempted by people raving about new IGs, new LAs, new products you offer and so forth!

As an aside, I also gave up on the Mothering.com forums too for a similar reason - so heavily policed and restricted in signatures and content. I just don't do well with Big Brother sites and prefer to spend my time on sites where free flow of ideas AND LINKS flourish. No renewing my subscription to their magazine either.

The attitude and business sense of companies means a whole lot to me. I buy handmade, support small business and look carefully at my choices. The restrictive "big brother" feeling sites really are a turnoff to me, and I will not use my money to support an attitude like that.

Butterflies are bye bye

We lost our last butterfly last Friday. Their lives are brief unfortunately. As I had mentioned, Zach did not want to release them but rather care for them in their enclosure. As we were down to the last two we convinced him Thursday night to release them. We took them out to the garden and gently put them on one of our roses. We got to see them drink and stay there for a while, observing, before they left. The next morning Zach found one on the ground by the rose. I looked out and he was sitting quietly holding it and touching it's wings. We found a cardboard box for burial, and he put some of his "treasuries" in with it, i.e., giving it a proper Egyptian burial as he has been reading about the Egyptian kings recently. He gave up some of his stick on jewels for the jewels for the afterlife for this little butterfly.

I'm so glad we decided to do the butterflies part of science this year. I think Zach really got a lot out of it, and it will be a very nice memory for him for a long time to come. In a year or two we will probably do it again, and maybe more as each child reaches that level in our curriculum to study the lifecycle of butterflies. It really does solidify the book learning to raise them and watch them.

Eewww - what is that?!

Yuck - That might be your first reaction to the photo today (along with the thought it is a terrible angle and quality of photo) but on further inspection you will see we were very happy to see these this morning. In fact, they are our Painted Lady Butterflies. They came in a kit of caterpillars and the photo you see is four out of five of them in chrysalis form. We have been watching them grow for the last little over a week and following their progress. More photos to follow next week hopefully. :)

A few links:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Painted_Lady
http://www.earthsbirthday.org/butterflies/bflys/activitykit/2.htmlhttp://animaldiversity.ummz.umich.edu/site/accounts/information/Vanessa_cardui.html