As we were reading together yesterday we read a book called The Christmas Cobwebs, the book was about a cobbler whose home and business catches on fire and they have to move to a new home before Christmas. I asked my kinder girl if she knew what a cobbler was, and she said "someone who cleans up cobwebs? " Makes perfect sense to me :)

Book Club

One of the things I love about homeschooling is that it gives me an excuse to read great children's literature. Right now we are reading The Family Under the Bridge. It's a great little story that takes place in Paris about a hobo names Armand and a family who recently became homeless. Their worlds come together when Armand discovers the family has moved into his spot under a bridge. Armand is a self proclaimed loner and is struggling to keep his heart from becoming too attached to the children he refers to as starlings. We are only 5 chapters into it but I'm loving the story.

Stump the Teacher

We have started a new game for Bible time in the morning. It started with the story of Jacob's ladder. After I read the story I drew a picture of a ladder on our white board and made a sticky note with a picture of an angel drawn on it. For each question about the story that they got right the angel moved up a ring on the ladder. They thought this was great fun, and have wanted to play this game everyday with our stories. Today the tables were reversed. After I read the story, my kinder girl wanted to be the one to ask the questions, and move the angel. She did such a great job that I think we will continue with this way of doing things. It requires a higher level of thinking and forces her to have to really listen to the story.

Kindergarten Corner

We took almost two weeks off in November due to birthdays and Thanksgiving, so we are not going to take too much time off from our regular schooling in December, Although we are going to add in lots of fun Christmas activities, Especially baking and crafts. I have decided to move our school time from the kitchen into the Playroom. I'm doing this mostly for me, I have such a hard time staying focused on getting school done when I am surrounded by things that I think need to get done ie. laundry, dishes, etc. But the playroom is such a fun and bright place to be that I am really enjoying our time there, plus it's easier to keep the other children entertained.

Here are a few pictures from the day.

We use Handwriting Without Tears, for our writing curriculum. After we do our lesson the wood pieces always end up as roads for Zacks matchbox cars :) We were working on Math with the Geoboard. Right now I'm using Saxon Math, I don't know if I will continue to use this curriculum I really love how it uses the spiral method, but I'm looking for a more hands on approach, and because the lessons are so easy we breeze through several a day.

Zoe is working on a word sorting activity here.

We ended the day by making gingerbread cookies. Even the baby got in on the action.

The Hundred Dresses

Our read aloud for the past 2 weeks has been The Hundred Dresses by Eleanor Estes. This is a great book that has allowed for some great discussion between Zoe and I. Although I think some of it might have been a little over Zoe's head, I'm sure that the general message was able to get through, I am also sure that it is one of those kind of stories that will stick with us for a while. The Hundred Dresses, is about Wanda, a poor immigrant girl and her way of coping with her poverty and the constant teasing she receives for wearing the same blue dress to school everyday, One of her ways of coping is to tell a story to the little girls about how she has 100 dresses in her closet. We find out by the end of the story that she is not exactly lying. The little girls in the story are not necessarily portrayed as being terrible, they are just immature and materialistic. The story ends sadly with the little girl moving away because of the treatment from the children in her class. This leaves the girls with feelings of remorse and they attempt to make it right with Wanda, but they find out that they are a little too late.
As you can imagine there are so many great discussions that can come from this book. I have decided that when Zoe is just a little older I will put together a mother, daughter book club and this is one of those books we will revisit again.

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