We are trying to stay active during the long, snowy winter and this is the list we came up with for our family. Here are some creative ideas we found: rock climbing, snow golf (carve out your own holes), spray bottles with colored water to spray on snow, snow tubing, lemon ice making, dance party, obstacle course building, and indoor fort building. More ideas listed in the post.
A Dad Friend sent me this article from the New York Times on ruthless decluttering, Mom, You’re One Tough Art Critic. The more I thought about posting on this, the more I remembered the piles of messy art that I have squirreled away throughout my house and realized that I was in no position to be giving advice on how to purge or store your child’s artwork.
Here’s how to enter 90 Second Newbery Film Festival (deadline 9/15/11):
1. Your video should be 90 seconds or less. (Okay, okay: if it’s three minutes long but absolute genius, we’ll bend the rules for you. But let’s try to keep them short.)
2. Your video has to be about a Newbery award-winning (or Newbery honor-winning) book.
Are Search and Find books the precursor to video/DSi/Wii/xBox/Nintendo games for little boys? Maybe … but I’ll take that any day over the screens! I have to say that I have never logged in so many hours searching for stuff in books until I had my third child and my only son. Coincidence? I think not. There is a gaming feature that never seems to bore my son from searching and finding stuff in books. This, however, does not seem to translate into searching and finding [lost] stuff in his room or in the house.
Thank you to everyone who sent in pictures! PLEASE keep them coming!!! You can email me at pragmaticmom.com (at) gmail (dot) com. This week I found some of these pictures on literacy sites that I read but my favorite one is from mom Sierra! This is just precious!
My 5th grader is doing a Sharon Creech author study in class and she’s been reading and loving Ruby Holler, Heartbeat, and trying to get the group that gets to read Chasing Redbird. We tend to agree on books that we like but it’s strange that we haven’t when it comes to Sharon Creech. Don’t get me wrong; we both LOVE, LOVE, LOVE Sharon Creech, but we LOVE, LOVE, LOVE different books.
Ambling Books is a great site for FREE audio books. If your child reads along with the audio playing, it’s a great way to improve his or her reading skills. Try this with a reluctant reader. This is their Top 10: Audio Books for Kids list.