My friend Alicia, an amazing and inspiring homeschool Mom and published poet, is offering a free 10-week online course called Poetry For Kids. You can find this first week’s lesson and suggested activities here. This week’s lesson is focused on cliches, and trying to find fresh ways of saying things / evoking imagery in one’s poetry. The boys and I did the “fill in the blank” cliche-busting exercise, and came up with:

It was a fun exercise to do, and while not every answer quite ‘worked’ for me, some of my kids’ suggestions surprised me. “Soft as oatmeal”, “chickadee days” and a “Mary Poppins ending” all create a clear image in my mind. What are your favourites? (And yes…all the ‘butt’ related answers came from the 6-year-old. Sigh.)

Hope you get a chance to play along with some of the Poetry For Kids activities. I am very appreciative when folks offer up some activities from their area of expertise, and even more so when their area of expertise is one of my areas of weakness. So thank you, Alicia, the the poetry  course. I’ll stick to math.

Ant is on her best behavior when she attends Lion’s dinner party, but she is shocked by how the others act. Elephant talks only about himself; hippo never wipes her mouth and gorilla throws his food! Their behavior is even more outrageous when dessert arrives. Each animal takes exactly half of the lion’s cake, demonstrating very bad manners – as well as the basic concept of division! When the cake gets to ant, there are only a few crumbs left – and the lion hasn’t even had his share! To make amends for such bad manners and lack of cake, ant promises to bake a special one for lion. Not to be outdone by such generosity, the others promise cake as well, each one doubling the number until elephant must bake 256! As ant and lion enjoy a delicious strawberry sponge cake, readers may decide that halving and doubling have never been so much fun. Includes A Conversation With the Author!

My boys both enjoyed this DVD, though perhaps for different reasons. The story is cute and simple and contains some interesting questions about fairness (‘Each animal did the same thing—take half the cake left—yet the results don’t seem fair. How can it not be fair when they all did the same thing?’), interesting math (‘My, don’t the number of cakes quickly get out of control when each animal wants to bake double the number of the previous animal!’), and questions of character (‘What did you think of the way different animals behaved?’). On the story and math level, the DVD fully engaged Gareth (age 6). Daegan (age 9) found the story a bit simple, but was very engaged by the end of the DVD with the conversation with the author, who also did the illustrations. Learning where the author got the idea for the story (from a party he was at where no one took the last piece of food, each just kept cutting off a small bit), how he adapted it for a kids’ picture book, how some of his ideas didn’t quite work out (originally he wanted each animal down the line to be half the size of the previous animal, just like the cake), and how he created the illustrations were fascinating to my older son, who is doing some significant work on writing skills this year.

All in all, a really cute video with lots more going on than a simple story / simple math. I found a copy at our library. Happy viewing!

The next day, after listening to Gareth complain about how much printing there was to do during homeschool, and “couldn’t I just read the question and say the answer, and you write it Mom?”, I found him in the homeschool room with his new Pokemon book. (And yes, I often will do the writing of his answers if he asks, especially if the point of the exercise is more to do with reading, following directions, comprehension, or specific content than the skill of penmanship):

(The printing above is Gareth listing off various Pokemon types, BTW).

Of course, the above took place early in the week, with the boys ready and raring to go on grade 2 and 4. Today, in contrast, I received the following from Daegan, who was doing some pages about subjects and predicates. Note especially answers 2 and 6:

Yes, indeed, son…”farted loudly” is a predicate and not a subject. (Rather unsuccessfully stifling a giggle). Let’s move on! One positive of this, though, is that Gareth now “can’t wait!” to begin his Grammar and Punctuation workbook, whereas previously the subject held zero interest.

and a set of tangram pieces ($1). Gareth was quite keen to try it out and made several animals yesterday from the beginning part of the book, where the outline of each piece is given:

As you progress through the book, some of the individual shape outlines are removed, until by the end, only the outline of the entire animal is left. Gareth looks quite pleased with himself, no? It was hard to get him to stop so we could have lunch and get to our art playdate at a friends’ for papier mache!

And what was Daegan doing in the background? He’s taken a real interest in learning to handwrite (cursive), and was practicing some letters:

We’ve been using a program I am LOVING called All About Spelling, which I will write more about another time. The spelling lists we practice have Daegan working on spelling (below his level; I’m mainly using the program as a learning-to-read program for Gareth), as well as proper lower-case printing and cursive, like so:

Gareth, in contrast, spells the word any way he can (usually capital letters). This leads to our whiteboard looking like this for ten short words, as I write so the boys can self-check: (the list of words on the right-hand-side came from our discussion of the strategy of looking for smaller words inside larger ones—helpful for both spelling and reading)

I’m sure things will change in the future, but with the new homeschooling room the boys are super-keen to learn, learn, learn and ‘play school’ right now….so I’m running with it!

Daegan started with a rough draft of his thank you letter, and after he and I corrected a few spelling errors and discussed proper format for letters, he did this final copy which we will send. There’s been much improvement in his printing over the past year, but as you can see, while he reads at a grade 9 level (details here), the rest of his language arts skills are solidly grade 3:

He also started a drawing to send along, copying a book cover. He’s quite keen on block lettering right now:

Gareth spent most of his time working on his drawing, which turned out wonderfully. So good, in fact, that Gareth has decided he doesn’t want to send it in the mail at all—he wants to keep it. Thank goodness for scanners and photocopiers!

Gareth wrote the “Dear Grandma” and “Love Gareth” parts of his letter himself, and dictated the rest to me. I do find it amusing how different the boys are. Daegan’s letter was very blunt and to the point, and I had to suggest a few ways to expand it. But Gareth? When I suggested the opening line, “Thank you for the Easter card”, he decided it wasn’t quite right: “Thank you for the lovely Easter card,” he dictated, with emphasis. Quite the socially adept one.

Thank you notes are a great way to have kids get some writing practice that is far more practical and ‘real world meaningful’ than pages of “A A a a ant aardvard apple”. I only wish I were better and remembering to do this. Anyone else suffer from great intentions, but weak follow through?

The boys have also had a few firsts recently. Yesterday, Daegan blew his first reasonable-sized bubblegum bubble (i.e., not a teeny pea-sized pocket with a bit of air in), and was right proud of himself:

And I found this drawing in Gareth’s room. As far as I know, this is his first understandable-to-others printed sentence (I have oodles of pages of loops and scratches ‘pretend writing’, as well as sentences made of random combinations of letters). This is a new stage of Gareth’s literacy skill development:

The sentence, for those not fluent in Gareth, is “My dinosaur is powerful T rex.”

Oh, and the sun shone pretty much all day, the temps climbed above freezing, and I heard my first chickadee “fee bee / spring’s here” call. February days don’t get much better than this!

We talked briefly about what subjects and predicates were, and then mixed the subjects and predicates up, and put them face down into piles:

Daegan then made “silly sentences”, learning that subjects and predicates can be mixed and matched. This activity was met with lots of smiles and giggles, and even rolling on the floor at one point:

Here’s some of the silly sentences he made:

And I’d like it noted, for the record, that not one of these sentences was about dinosaurs! We’ll build on this activity in future, changing out nouns and verbs a la Mad Libs, adding in adjectives and adverbs, etc.

Gareth was keen to have a go, so he chose his topic (woolly mammoths) and grabbed the die:

He rolled a 2, and started his poem, rolling a 6 and a 4 and dictating each line to me as he went along. It was a bit tricky getting the exact number of words correct, but by telling me what he wanted to say, we were able to paraphase without loss of meaning. (e.g., his final line he wanted to say “The dinosaurs were already extinct, and then the mammoths went extinct too” so we played around with various phrases until he found a 4-word phrase he liked.)

Gareth then wanted to add a picture to his poem, so while he worked on that, Daegan and I created another dice poem. His topic? Dinosaurs—what else? Daegan’s rolls were surprisingly non-random: a whole lot of 1s and 5s.

Daegan then copied his poem (he needed no help from me with his dice poem other than transcribing what he said) and drew pictures to accompany it:

Here’s the boys’ finished work. This was a great activity! Thanks, Alicia!

The Hippo Runs Wild by Gareth

Once upon a time there was a hippo that lived in a zoo. His name was Rhino. This zoo had penguins that wore underwear, and elephants that wore baskets on their heads, and giraffes that danced with blue ballet shoes. This zoo used to be at the North Pole, but is now in Canada.

One day, the hippo used its teeth to bite a hole big enough to get out of its enclosure. He wanted some fresh air. The hippo ran wild! The silly penguins took off their underwear, and chased the hippo, but couldn’t catch him. The elephants used their trunks to take their baskets off, and followed the hippo, and setted up a trap for the hippo. But it didn’t work. The giraffes took off their blue ballet shoes and tried to catch the hippo, but that didn’t work.

Then a man came, a zookeeper. And he knew what hippos ate. Plants, and lots of them, like lettuce. He got some plants and put them into a new hippo enclosure. The hippo came over because he was getting hungry, and the man opened the door and the hippo went into his new home. The man threw more food at the hippo to keep him happy in his new enclosure.

They took the old enclosure to the North Pole to Santa’s elves and the elves fixed it. And they got it back for Christmas, a Christmas present for the zoo. And they put some small mongooses in it, and it was just the right size for the mongooses.

The end.

Gareth later drew this picture to go along with his story; he told me it is of a penguin wearing underwear!