Adventures in Mama-Land

Well, not taking a holiday; that’s for sure!  We’ve been reading up a storm… here’s a selection of our current read-alouds… We’re also slowly making our way through our “ Winter Reading List ,” based on the Second Five in a Row unit study curriculum.  You can get the printable wall chart for that reading list here .  As with the First FIAR reading list we did last year, some of the books are wonderful; others are just so-so.  Links to all the books we’re reading are over here in the Official MamaLand Amazon Homeschool Curriculum n’ More Store .     So here's the big fat excuse for why I haven't been posting: our stupid !#$^ computer has been failing for a while, and when that happens, I end up spending 95% of my “relaxing” computer time just trying to make the thing work.  Finally, 2 weeks ago, one of the hard drives quit entirely and I ordered a new computer – well, a $250 out-of-date refurbished computer that I could stick the working har...

While it seems to be a public holiday in some parts, around here, with two MORE field trips this week (sigh), we can’t really spare any time, so we’re hard at work – for a change. These are the kids’ narrations for this painting, Mary Cassatt’s The Boating Party .  I typed them, so it went quickly. Gavriel Zev’s (his “sketch” of this painting is at right): In the painting, I saw the sea was a little bit green. Two people were on a boat – just plain people, skinny people. One was a man and one was a woman. There was a baby, too. There was a city in the background and some was trees. I liked the painting because there was a lot of particular things. I didn’t like the people very much – they looked a little bit bad (like they weren’t well drawn). And Naomi Rivka’s – I typed hers, then had her copy out the shortest sentence, in keeping with the Well-Trained Mind approach to easing them into their own creative writing, using short passsages from their own narration (in addition to ...

So I slipped it into this post a couple of weeks ago but nobody set off fireworks, so here it is again: We finished The Long Winter !!!  It was a very, very, VERY hard book to get through.  The rollicking image of winter fun and snowball fighting on the cover is a LIE, I tell you.  They’re just plain lying if they tell you this book will be any fun at all.  It’s a town of barely 100 people slowly, slowly, painfully starving to death over a vicious prairie winter that lasts from, I believe, early October until May.  In fact, if you’re fascinated by such things, there’s actually an adult nonfiction book, The Long Hard Winter of 1880-81: What was it Really Like? , that sounds like it will happily fill you in on all the gruesome details. The Laura Ingalls Wilder book itself is aimed at kids, so everything comes out fine in the end – nobody starves, and the family eats the very last of the grain basically the minute the five-months-overdue train pulls into the...

   Three FOUR sites, a quick roundup: Chronicles of Narnia – many books in the series (Christian site), fully downloadable FREE.  I just found out about this one and I’m pretty excited, I must say.  The site may be swamped because of a mention on Homeschool Freebie of the Day a couple of weeks ago.   Kiddie Records .com – digitized LPs of many older children’s classics, including Carol Channing reading Winnie the Pooh, Mike Mulligan and his Steam Shovel, the Story About Ping and Caps for Sale, Babar, and many others.  Recordings aren’t all perfect, but they will immerse you in a world of nostalgia.  Spend some time at the site and you will turn up many winners, I promise.  All on “unbreakable” mp3’s!!   Librivox.org – Free, public-domain recordings of free, public-domain children’s literature, including treasures like A Little Princess and the Just So Stories .  Their main index is horrendously tough to navigate.  If you...

We finished reading Stuart Little tonight, and what a weird kids’ chapter book it is.  I hadn’t realized how close we were to the ending, because the plot wasn’t really going anywhere or winding down – and then, all of a sudden yesterday, we were one chapter away from the end, and it STILL wasn’t going anywhere. Well, I hate to ruin the ending for you, but… well, it never did. And I thought, how are the kids going to take this?  Even the seemingly neverending Little House books always come to some kind of resolution at the end of each book, and yet this weird little story about a crazy jovial mouse, well, it doesn’t.  He just keeps on journeying. So I asked the kids, “do you think he’ll ever find Margalo?”  Naomi most definitely said he wouldn’t .  “Because he’s on the ground and a bird is high up.”  Most logical indeed.  But a couple of minutes later, out of the blue (I was just about to start reading something else), she said, “I think t...

A few weeks ago, I blogged about “ winning a gift card .”  I was joking, but guess what???  I won!!!  I got my card in the mail this week, and tonight, had some fun choosing and ordering homeschool books – what else? – online from Chapters / Indigo . I’m SO happy, I just want to tell all Canadian homeschoolers to go check out their site one more time.  Remember, the first issue even has an article by me in it!  (more to come if I can get my act together to write for their issue topics / deadlines…) So what did I buy???   Ancient Science , by Jim Wiese, as recommended by Michelle at Lionden Landing .  Before she was a homeschool mama, she was a science teacher who really knows her stuff!  I’m very excited about this book. Science Around the World , by Janice VanCleave, as suggested by our Grammar-Stage Elemental Science curriculum.  And finally, just to use up the gift card… Just So Stories , by Rudyard Kipling, bec...

I’m a big fan of Ambleside Online - a free, Charlotte Mason based curriculum – but not exactly an “orthodox” follower, both in terms of doing exactly what the curriculum says and in terms of not incorporating the best of other methodologies.  Still, I dislike the term “eclectic” because it’s just too darn vague, and CM is the philosophy with which I find myself most closely aligned.  A lot of homeschoolers forget that Ambleside is not the only valid application of Charlotte Mason’s philosophies today – as I’m reading in a fascinating book, When Children Love to Learn: A Practical Application of Charlotte Mason's Philosophy for Today .  (because this post is a booklist, I’m highlighting all the book titles – even MY books!) See the link list at the end of this post for other FREE Charlotte Mason curriculum sites.  Fascinating fact pointed out by When Children Love to Learn:  Charlotte Mason’s approach failed to become well-established in the UK and not...

No, I haven’t dropped off the face of the earth!  We’re out much more than usual this week because Naomi’s spending the week at day camp and I’m running around entertaining Gavriel Zev and doing my own thing. Here’s my project for this evening:  we’re having so much fun with our summer reading list , stickers and all, that I decided to do a year-long reading list – oy, vey!  - that will take us from September to June.  I’ve incorporated reading lists from Five in a Row, Volume 2 and Sonlight Read-Alouds A .  (I found this post very helpful for explaining the differences in approach between the two book lists, and like its author, concluded that I’d love my kids to get the benefits of both lists – even though we’re not doing the complete program.) This is really a VERY diverse batch of books.  Some are quite short – others, like James Herriot's Treasury for Children , may take the bulk of the year.  A few are out of print, but I’ve checked th...

The bloggy world seems to be going crazy about these books – apparently, with good reason. They’re a series of 4 short chapter books about the adventures of Anna Hibiscus , a little girl growing up in her large, extended, multi-generational family in “amazing Africa.” I don’t have the books yet; in fact, I just ordered them a few minutes ago.  But the second I’d skimmed a couple of reviews (including this very thorough one, which features page samples) I knew that the littles and I would go crazy for these books.  There are tons of exuberant illustrations by Lauren Tobia, which seem like they’d only add to the fun.  The first recommendation I saw was from Good Tree Montessori , a Muslim montessori homeschool site.  She suggests that they’re particularly good for “brown girls” – but then, she doesn’t know about my daughter’s obsession with skin colour , which she may be less open about these days, but finds no less fascinating.  So I think “brown gir...

We re-read the wonderful Frog & Toad story A Lost Button this afternoon (from Frog and Toad Are Friends ).  I love this story!  I really like the whole book, actually… I picked up all three paperbacks as a boxed set for no particular reason and I’m very glad I did.  (We also have this particular volume in Hebrew!) Anyway, I thought this would be a perfect theme for a quick math lesson to wrap up our week tomorrow, with the help of this free download page .  We used it once last year, but it was a while ago, and I think I only did it with GZ while Naomi Rivka worked on something else. I created two activities of my own to go along with the page.  You’ll need to download the first page, print it out, then cut out the buttons and sort them for the first activity sheet.  Then, on the second sheet, you can reuse the buttons by gluing them on to Toad’s jacket.   For both these sheets, as usual, I have mercilessly and shamelessly borrowed images ...

Updated July 6/2011! Here are the chapter books we’ve read since we started “formally” homeschooling in the summer of 2010.  I decided it would be nice to make a list, since I’m starting to lose track. But first: Who are we? In case you have no clue who “we” are – I’m Mommy, the main reader, and mainly who I read to are our two younger homeschooled children, Naomi Rivka, age 6.5, and Gavriel Zev, age 3.5.  When do we read? We don’t have a reading schedule, as such.  On most regular homeschool days, we have two major reading times:  one in the middle of the day and one at the end of the day.  I try to include the three “regulars” every day, but that doesn’t always happen.  It often doesn’t happen. How we read: Most of our chapter-book reading is just that, reading , with little or no schoolwork attached to it.  EXCEPT:  they are expected to narrate each chapter or section as we read it.  That’s simpler than it sounds.  I f...

Other “weekly challenges”: Six Word Saturday Homeschool Diary I haven’t done one of these in a while, but I do want to keep it up, so I figure I’d better get into the habit before Purim and Pesach run everything completely off the rails around here.  We’ve had a couple of “field trip” weeks, and it’s amazing how just one outing in the middle of the week can throw things totally off for the entire seven days.  They were good trips, though – one to the fire station, and last week, to the Museum.  Naomi was playing Museum today – by making her own “coprolites” (ie dinosaur poo) out of cardboard, coloured grey and brown. I love how people online sometimes name their homeschool.  There must be a philosophy that recommends it.  If I ever do, which I probably never will, I would call our homeschool “The Smile Factory.”  Mostly because we have so many tears and screaming around here.  Luckily, most of the tears and screaming have ...

We’re reading Magic Tree House #3:  Mummies in the Morning , and on the way home from supper last night (my mother surprised me with cabbage rolls), we were talking about Ancient Egypt, and how our Avos spent time there. Naomi Rivka:  “You know, Egypt, Israel, Jordan, Syria… they’re all –” (pause) “- they’re like good friends .” Um, okay!  I just said, “because they’re so close together!” and she agreed. We left it at that:  I cannot bear to disillusion her.

Hi!  Welcome to my blog!  For some reason, this nondescript entry has become one of my most popular posts of all time.  If you’re here because you were googling dinosaur math, welcome, but I don’t really have a lot more math printables.  If you want to read more anyway, click here to get to the REAL excitement. (That said, if you want to download this printable from Google Docs/Drive, it may deny you permission and send me an email requesting that I share it with you.  I don’t know why it does this and I have to do it manually for each and every person, even though I told Google Docs/Drive that anybody who has the link can download it.  So anyway, be patient – I have to do it manually.) Two new printables for math or science – sorting and graphing dinosaur heights.  There’s also some work in here on cardinal vs ordinal numbers, since this is coming up in our math workbook.  I made these because we’re going to the museum next week!  Plus, w...

Hosted at Mouse Grows, Mouse Learns – my first time participating, and I don’t know yet whether it will become a regular thing, but I was about to post a reading list anyway, so why not? By way of intro, without boring regular readers to tears, I’m homeschooling my 2 youngest:  Naomi Rivka, who’s almost 6, and Gavriel Zev, who’s 3.  We’re following a Charlotte Mason / Well-Trained Mind Classical inspired curriculum, and I’m trying to avoid “ twaddle ” for our main readings. We’re reading through the Little House books, but after finishing On the Banks of Plum Creek last Shabbos, we’re taking a break before Farmer Boy, which will probably be our next selection.  (drat, just realized I was supposed to buy it at the bookstore tonight and I totally forgot and bought a bunch of other stuff instead!!!) (senior moment) So here’s what we’re reading together instead: Matilda by Roald Dahl I love Roald Dahl, and I have always loved sharing his writing with my children....