The boys had such a good time sledding, and it tuckered them out. They must have gone up and down that hill 30 times, at least!

I posted a few videos on facebook. Let’s see if embedding them here works.

We then headed home, with the boys playing in some deep snowdrifts on the way.

They also found some giant snowballs that they insisted on bringing home, because, well…I guess our yard didn’t have enough snow.

When we got home a rosy-cheeked Daegan relaxed on the couch reading Far Side cartoons:

While Gareth made us all some of his special hot chocolate recipe. He wrote it out himself the other day:

We even had vegan whipped cream on hand to add on top. Yum!

Yup. A great day!

It’s one of the “I’m Going to Read” series, from the first level (50 words); the series has 4 levels, with stories at the levels using 50, 100, 200, and 300 different words in their telling. You can see all the titles in the series here. Gareth is past this beginning reading stage now, but being under the weather I decided to simply run with it. I’m glad I did, as it turned into a fun little journey into the world of literary allusions. Once he finished reading me the story, I ran downstairs and got our copy of Robert McCloskey’s classic Make Way for Ducklings.

As I started reading, the boys grew more and more interested: “Hey! The duck is called Mrs. Mallard in this book too!…”Hey! They’re going to the Public Garden, just like in the other book!…”There’s the swan boat!”…(much giggling) “The ducklings are called Jack, Kack, Lack, Mack, Nack, Ouack, Pack, and Quack!” and so on. I mentioned briefly that doing what had been done in the first book Gareth read—referring back to a story from another author—is called “making an allusion”. I told the boys that the more they read, the more they’d start seeing allusions and connections all over the place. And not just in books. We recently watched a Bill Nye episode (The Heart, I think, but it might have been Respiration) in which Bill talks about how our heart keeps pumping and pumping and going and going with no thought from us, while a giant pink bunny banging a drum walks by in the background. The boys HOWLED with laughter—we’d spent some time one cold and dull winter’s night showing them old commercials on youtube, and the Energizer Bunny featured prominently. They got the comedic allusion.

Some more in depth side-by-side comparing followed:

I made two types: apple-cinnamon (on left) and cranberry-almond (on right). Both were pretty good, though we all though the apple-cinnamon could have been even more apple-cinnamony (and I doubled those ingredients from the original recipe!):

When you have waffles for dinner, there are no complaints, just sticky children.

The first adapted script they read from was Dr. Seuss’s classic Yertle the Turtle, in which Yertle stacks turtles to place his throne upon, so as to extend his lands as far as possible (as far as he could see). It was very well done, and had the kids giggling as they mimed the stacking turtles:

The kids enjoyed many of the songs and poems where they were invited to participate:

And the class ended by making a rainstorm, using their hands to rub (for wind), snap fingers (first drops), clap hands (heavier rain), slap thighs (pouring rain), stomp feet (thunder), exactly as we had done at the Calgary Philharmonic performance a few weeks ago. I love this activity, but someone needs to let folks know that many (most?) kids under 8 or 10 have a very hard time snapping their fingers! (Daegan made a clicking sound with his tongue instead, and all the other kids followed suit):

So, not what I was expecting, but my two didn’t seem to mind at all. And they spent some time looking for books at the library afterwards, a favourite activity.

Visiting with friends of all ages:

Running, running, running, follow-the-leader style:

Playing quiet, make-believe games with new friends (there was some kind of bank robbing scenario where the park bits—which they put in the empty containers—were coins, and the watering cans were piggy banks):

Looking for bugs (yes, that’s Daegan):

And swinging barefoot in the sunshine.

Summer is coming!

“You know Mom, some numbers make good parts of dinosaurs. Like a 7 makes a good pterodactyl wing, and an upside down 6, or 9, make a good apatosaurus neck. And the round part is, of course, the head!”

–Daegan, out of the blue as he was working on his math one morning

I later found this drawing, which he told me he began with a zero (the body) and some 7s (the wings):

I was also wondering a bit about the ‘flasher’ pose, but when Daegs told me about his drawing he told me that bit between the legs was a tail. Whew!

Yes, that’d be snow in the background. The part of the yard that gets shaded by the fence (and is north-facing) still has snow, but take a look in the other direction:

Not only is there no snow to be had, we’ve got some new green growth near the house, in this sheltered, south-facing spot. If I ever try growing grapes in this yard, that’s where they’ll be planted! I think this is the beginnings of a Johnny jump-up / viola:

And I know this is the start of a hollyhock. We have a huge clump of them right under our living room bay window, and their seeds go everywhere. So nice to see green again!

Gareth wanted to show me some grass he has picked, to feed his herd of plant-eating dinosaurs:

Gareth’s other preoccupation, which is spent quite a bit of time on, was taking apart dried hollyhock stems. He found the hollow stems (where insects hibernate) and the soft spongy interior quite fascinating:

Daegan, on the other hand, started rummaging through the leaf litter:

At first he found only new green growth (I am not sure if it is creeping jenny or creeping charlie):

But then he found what he was looking for; two of them, in fact:

He gave one to Gareth, and the boys played with them for ages, before carefully putting them back in the leaf litter. While it is warm during the day, we are a long way from warm nights or the end of snowy weather in Alberta. (In fact, we get most of our snow in spring in Calgary, in March and April).

Then Gareth found something else to play with—perhaps the greatest kid plaything ever: MUD!

And here is how their afternoon ended. A lovely, lovely day. Hope to do it again soon!

I began giving each boy 1 stick. “What can you make?” I asked. We quickly found out the answer: not much with only 1 stick! You could make 1 (one), I (capital ‘aye’), or l (lower case ‘ell’). That was about it. I then gave the boys a second stick. “What can you make now?” Here’s some of the possibilities, both letters and numbers:

Note that the final two shapes could also be symbols: the equal sign, or the plus (adding) or times (multiplying) sign.

With three sticks there were even more letters and numbers, and our first shape. Here are some of them:

And with four sticks we could make a couple of shapes, and more:

I threw out words like ‘quadrilateral’ and ‘rhombus’, and pointed out that all squares are rectangles, but not all rectangles are squares. Gareth decided he’s played enough and wanted to do some drawing, but Daegan was keen add more sticks. We focussed on shapes from here on in.

With five sticks, a pentagon:

At this point we abandoned the paper underneath, as it was sliding around and making it harder than it needed to be to place the sticks in position. I told Daegan that another shape you could make with 5 sticks was a star, and showed him how to do it, using the interior angles of the pentagon as a guide:

With six sticks, Daegan got very excited about hexagons. “I know where we see those in nature! In a beehive!” And he started flapping his arms and buzzing like a bee:

He then opened the nearby cupboard and got out some Crispex cereal, another hexagon. It got gobbled up nanoseconds after I got this shot:

We then played around making shapes inside the hexagon (as we had done with the star in the pentagon), and found this:

Note that as these are all equilateral triangles, we can use this image to prove that the interior angles of a hexagon add up to 720 degrees. (Each angle in the triangle is 60 degrees, as 60 x 3 = 180 degrees, which is the number of degrees in  a triangle. Since two angles from each triangle are used to make the interior angles of the hexagon, and there are 6 triangles, you get 6 x 120 = 720 degrees). I did NOT do this with my seven year old in case you are wondering!

We quickly made a heptagon (7 sides), talking about how you don’t often see that shape anywhere, and moved on to the octagon. Daegan had an idea right away to complete the image:

Have fun with this activity; it’s quite flexible and can be adapted to different ages and abilities.