We’re taking a ‘mental health’ day today as it has been a busy week, and we’re all fighting off colds to boot. But Gareth and I still spent a few minutes snuggling on the couch with him reading aloud to me, something we wanted more for the snuggles than the reading today, I’d think. Gareth [...]
The boys and I have been working our way through the simply fabulous list of “living math books” from Julie Brennen, who runs the LivingMathForum e-mail group. You can find the list of books, organized by topic (addition, fractions, geometry, etc.) here. And what is a “living book” you may ask? A “living” book is [...]
We’ve been in a real Roald Dahl phase here lately, so imagine our delight to find out today is Roald Dahl Day! Over the past few weeks Jim read the boys Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, and on the weekend we watched the 2005 Johnny Depp version of the movie as a family. The boys [...]
In addition to All About Spelling, which I reviewed in depth here, Gareth has become a fluent reader over the past several months through daily levelled reading—something that, in all honesty, I am not a fan of and never expected to use with my own children. But for this child, it was exactly what he [...]
I recently read one of my favourite books from my own childhood, E. L. Konigsburg’s From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler, with Daegan. It’s the story of Claudia Kincaid, 12-year-old suburban girl with three younger brothers, who hatches an ingenious plan to run away from her dull life to the Metropolitan Museum [...]
Recently, the boys and I read three books by Joseph and James Bruchac that we really enjoyed: How Chipmunk Got His Stripes, Turtle’s Race with Beaver, and Raccoon’s Last Race. All three are superb retellings of Native American folktales that teach a moral lesson. Here’s a description of How Chipmunk Got His Stripes (from [...]
Today we finished our latest read-aloud novel, Farley Mowat’s Owls in the Family. First published in 1962, it tells the story of a boy, Billy, and his latest pets: two Great Horned Owls, which he names Wol and Weeps. Billy lives in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan and his pets include the expected (dog named Mutt) and the [...]
Did you celebrate Pi Day today? We did a few things. We began the day with an elaborate breakfast, in which we tried a new curried cauliflower frittata pie, along with “watermelon pie” (I just but the pieces and arranged on a plate like a pie) and “pancake pie” (we cut our pancakes in pie [...]
The other day the boys and I read On Beyond a Million (Canada)(US), one of the many ‘million-related’ math books by David M. Schwartz—How Much is a Million? is probably the best-known title. In On Beyond a Million, kids learn from Professor X a really fast way to count, faster than counting by 2s, or [...]
I recently blitzed our local library for phonics and learning-to-read books, putting some 50-odd titles on hold. Many of them were "How to teach your child to read” type books, and sadly, I have found most unhelpful—games-based or video-based learning seems to work better here. But I also put on hold a number of “first [...]