Homeschool Discoveries

Sharing a few things I've discovered along the way…

Book Discoveries this Week: Om-Kas-Toe and Walk the World’s Rim September 6, 2012

Filed under: Books — kirstenjoyhill @ 11:19 pm
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This week we’re finishing up our first “unit” or topic of our US History studies — Native Americans and Explorers.  We did two read-alouds related to this topic.  Maybe I should really only count it as one-and-a-half since we didn’t actually care for the second one well enough to finish it!

Right before our vacation we read Om-Kas-Toe: Blackfeet Twin Captures an Elkdog by Kenneth Thomasma.    Om-Kas-Toe and his sister Twin Girl are very lucky indeed — while both children are not normally allowed to survive when twins are born, their mother works hard and proves she can take care of both babies.  A series of lucky events seems to follow Om in particular, as he finds a very smart bird that he keeps as a pet and this bird leads him to a number of interesting discoveries.

At the time the story opens, the Blackfeet tribe has not yet been introduced to the horse.  Om and an older member of the tribe see a horse for the first time being led by a member of an unfriendly band of Indians.  This strange animal appeared to be large and powerful like an Elk, yet tame like a dog, hence the name “Elkdog”.   Eventually, Om and his sister are lucky enough to capture their tribe’s first Elkdog.  Om is growing up and proving himself responsible and is given the opportunities for even greater adventures and responsibilities.

The kids and I all really enjoyed this book.  I read this book during the day (as opposed to a bedtime read-aloud with Miss M) since I thought the boys would enjoy it too.  While Mr. K (age 3) got bored and wandered off at times, Mr E (age 5) was riveted — especially when Om or other characters in the story used any weapons.  :-).   After the book was over, he even asked if we could purchase a copy for ourselves so we could read it again some time (our copy came from Interlibrary loan — rare for us since our large library system carries almost everything that we want to read!).

Last week I started Walk the World’s Rim by Betty Baker as a history-related bedtime read-aloud with Miss M.  This story follows a young (fictitious) Native American boy from a poor tribe as he sets off on a journey with (real) Spanish explorer Cabaza de Vaca, two fellow Spaniards and a slave.   The party of travelers is taking a long route to Mexico, where they hope riches, honors and luxury await them.    To be honest, Miss M and I were both bored of this book by about half way through.  I skimmed ahead through the rest of the book and didn’t see much in it I was excited to read about.  I found myself hoping to find some excuse to skip reading it.

Since this wasn’t a classic work or a “must read”, I decided it would be okay to *gasp* just not finish it.  We rarely do this, but I didn’t want to waste our time given the long list of potential read-alouds I have for this year. Miss M seemed a bit relieved when I suggested we had the option to not finish the book!

I’m linking up with Read-Aloud Thursday @ Hope is the Word!

 

Collage Saturday: First Day of School! September 1, 2012

Filed under: Weekly Highlights — kirstenjoyhill @ 4:47 pm

Wow…it’s been three weeks since my last Collage/Week-in-Review post!  Two weeks ago at this time we had just finished up our Vacation Bible Camp at our church.  It was my third year organizing/directing the program:

After VBC week we had our family vacation/staycation.  You can see a few photos of that in this post. 🙂

That brings us to this week:

I like how the collage turned out but I didn’t quite get them in “order” as I wanted to tell the story of our week.  (In other words “sorry for the weird # order in this post”).  😉

Of course after a week of vacation/staycation. we had piles of laundry, bags to unpack and some overdue dishes from quick meals eaten on the way to and from our family fun.  So most of Monday was devoted to “vacation recovery.”  And with the busyness of VBC and summer fun in the weeks prior to VBC, I didn’t quite get all my intended school year preparations done.   A lot of Tuesday and Wednesday were devoted to that effort.

The kids were more helpful than usual in getting chores done around the house, and also did a great job amusing themselves with efforts like building the “world’s tallest duplo tower” (#8) and getting some very early Christmas preparations done by making some painted pine cone ornaments (#9).  We also enjoyed some impromptu nature observation as a very large (for around here, anyway) spider made a web about 2 ft. in diameter between the deck/part of the house. (#1 & #2).

Finally on Thursday I hoped we would be ready to “officially” start our school year with the first full day of school.   My mom visited on Wednesday, and stayed overnight since she had an obligation nearby on Thursday morning.  Having grandma around first thing in the morning was, of course, a bit distracting.  The kids found out on Wednesday about a book-making contest sponsored by our nearby Little Free Library, and they were eager to work on their books (#4 and #5).  Taking our back-to-homeschool pictures took a bit longer than I expected (#11 — see the rest of our “student photos” in this post).

So, needless to say, we didn’t accomplish our new “regular schedule” much at all on Thursday!  We did have some fun with handwriting practice outside (#10).  Mr. E is learning his lower case letters.

On Friday we did something my kids have been asking about all summer after reading this book — “Backwards Day”!   Tony was getting back from a short work trip on Friday morning (flying home on a redeye flight from the west coast), so it seemed like the perfect day to do it.  Usually the day ends with daddy coming home, but on Friday that’s how our day began.  We actually started Backwards Day with “lunch for dinner” the night before (aka a really easy dinner since daddy was gone!).  Then we had “dessert” for breakfast (apple crisp with a bit of ice cream on top — #6), “dinner” for lunch (meatloaf — something we never eat for lunch), and “breakfast” for dinner.  And of course the kids wore their clothes backwards!

We also completed our first “regular day” of school on Friday, trying out the new daily schedule I created.   I’m trying out short subject blocks of about 20 minutes each, with some five or ten minute breaks interspersed through the school day.  It felt a bit frenetic switching from topic to topic and kid to kid so quickly…but I am not sure how else to get to everything, not finish too late in the day, and also give enough attention to my 3rd grader AND my K’er.   I’m sure I’ll be writing more about our new daily schedule in an upcoming post.

I didn’t take many pictures during our first full school day (I was too busy trying to keep moving with the lessons and make sure we sort of stayed on schedule).  I did take photo #7 of Mr. E practicing his reading outside…and #3 of baby J creating chaos while I worked with the older kids.  🙂

Even though it was a little funny starting school with just a day or two before a three day weekend, I’m glad I had a chance to run through the schedule as tweak as necessary before we start an almost-full week.

Have a wonderful Labor Day Weekend!

I’m linking up with Collage Friday and the Weekly-Wrap-Up!

Homegrown Learners
 

First Day of Home School, 2012-2013

Filed under: News and Info — kirstenjoyhill @ 3:17 pm

We had our sort-of-first-day-of-school on Thursday (more on that in my week-in-review post), and we took our annual “new homeschool year” photos.

Miss M is now in 3rd grade:

Mr. E is a Kindergartener:

Mr. K is a three-and-a-half-year-old Preschooler:

And Baby J is 10 months old as of Thursday:

And here’s my best attempt at getting them in a “school photo” all together:

Check out more homeschool photos in the “Not Back to School Blog Hop!“

Not Back to School Blog Hop

 

Rides and Camping and Sand Castles, Oh My! August 28, 2012

Filed under: Fun Stuff and Extras — kirstenjoyhill @ 10:41 am
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We wrapped up Vacation 2012 on Sunday night:

It was an exciting 10 days! Highlights included: rides at the mall, camping at Mystery Cave/Forsestville state park, a tour of the Mystery Cave (which I neglected to take any pictures of!), going out for Gelato, a trip to the Minnesota State Fair (largest fair in the country by average daily attendance!), a trip to the extended-family lake cabin and nearby beach.

We spent yesterday tackling a twenty item to-do list of unpacking, laundry and whipping the house back into shape.  Today’s equally long (if not longer) to do list is filled with tasks  still needing to be done before we start a full school schedule.  Miss M wants to start school this week, so I am aiming to be ready on Thursday (we’ll see how that goes!).  Hopefully in the midst of that I can get back into the regular blogging routine too.  🙂

 

Logic of English Essentials Update (July/August 2012) August 14, 2012

Filed under: Curriculum — kirstenjoyhill @ 11:06 pm
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While I hadn’t necessarily been planning on posting very much this week…I had the night “off” from directing VBC tonight (thanks to one of my co-laborers who insisted she could run the show tonight), and writing a blog post seemed like an enjoyable way to spend a bit of my extra time.

I wrote a post a few months ago about my initial thoughts on using the Logic of English Essentials curriculum.  I’m intending to post continued thoughts about LOE-E and snapshots of how we’re using the curriculum throughout the year.  After a six-weeks-or-so break from all formal schoolwork, Spelling was one of the first subjects we added back in early July.  We started lesson 7 today, so we’re still early on in the program.

 

We’re still enjoying the games:

Though I do have to say it presents a challenge that Mr. K insists on playing with us most of the time.  But he barely knows his letters, much less his phonograms.  I also haven’t been working a whole lot with Mr. E yet on knowing all the sounds each phonogram makes (that’s on the to-do list once we get rolling with a full school schedule in September).  So, it makes for rather interesting game playing.  We still have only tried phonogram games for the most part.  I’d like to try some spelling word games soon.

 

I did make up my own game to practice choosing long A sounds.  I created cards for the various ways of spelling the /long A/ sound that we studied in lesson 4:

And Miss M and Mr. E had to run and grab the card that explained why a word has a /long A/ sound as I announced each word.   It was an okay, active game.  I think I could do something similar with /Long O/ sound words we are now studying in lesson 7.

 

Helpful Videos:

Logic of English has a YouTube channel.  I found the recent video of LOE author Denise Eide demonstrating how to do spelling dictation to be particularly helpful.  I discovered I was doing the “finger clues” for the number of letters in each phonogram incorrectly.  I also had Miss M watch the video.  She kept trying to tell me that I was “giving away” how to spell the words when I dictated a spelling list to her.  Having only done traditional “spelling tests” in the past, she didn’t quite understand that the point of spelling dictation is really to learn words that she may not already know.  Seeing the video helped her understand that I didn’t just make up some crazy way of teaching spelling words.  😉

 

ING-ANG-ONG-UNG:

I noticed that Miss M was having a hard time with the sounds associated with the -ng phonogram, so I created a little worksheet to help her.  Mr. E used it as well:

During review lesson #5 I noticed that Miss M would hear a word ending in -ng and have a hard time deciding which vowel sound she was hearing in front of that phonogram. I was hoping that if she created a little visual to go with each sound, it might help her keep the sounds straight.  We haven’t revisited those words yet to see if this helped.  Writing this out reminds me that I need to do that.  🙂

 

Writing Stories:

Miss M asked if she could write a story with her spelling words each week.  I said, “Of course!”   She is pretty good about asking how to spell words she doesn’t know but wants to add to the story.  She has written two stories so far — the first contained no mistakes (not counting words we haven’t worked on that she asked about first before writing down), and the second story only contained a couple of small mistakes.  One mistake that was kind of funny to me was her spelling of the word “later.”  She insisted several times that it must be “lader” — because that is how it sounds when she says it!  I had to write down “late” and “later” before it clicked for her!  Maybe “enunciation” or “articulation”  is a subject we’ll have to pay more attention to in the future!

 

Copywork:

I had Miss M do a copywork page using a suggested sentence to remember the nine words where EA says /long a/:

I’m also planning on reinforcing the spelling rules throughout the year by creating copywork pages based on each rule!

 

Biggest thing I dislike so far:

So, no program is perfect and I knew eventually I might find something I disliked about LOE-E.   I am finding I really don’t like the format of the workbook so much.  Not the activities themselves — those are fine.  It’s the kind of paper they are printed on and the perforations.

I’ll be honest and say that Miss M has had some moments of frustration while doing spelling dictation (though mostly before we watched the video — that really did help a lot!).  And when erasing needed to happen…the thin paper the workbook is printed on ripped very easily.  I think we have had no less than three out of six spelling dictation workbook pages we attempted to use ruined by ripping/holes during frustrated erasing.

And the pages really don’t stay in the workbook very well.   This is all fine and good I am sure for use in schools where papers are turned in to the teacher.  But I would prefer to keep a workbook together to use for review and reference and that’s just not going to happen with this workbook.  I really appreciate that the cost was kept low for this massive workbook, but I think I am now feeling like I would have gladly paid more for a nice spiral bound workbook with regular paper.

I’m still mulling over my options — I might purposely pull out a lesson’s worth of pages at a time and hole punch them or use my proclick binder on them.  At least they might stay together that way.  It wouldn’t solve the ripping problem, but I am crossing my fingers that we’ll have fewer frustrations in the future.

I’ll plan to share another update in a month or two!

 

All Quiet on the Bloggy Front… August 12, 2012

Filed under: News and Info — kirstenjoyhill @ 11:59 pm

Things may be pretty quiet around here for the next couple weeks (August 13th through August 26th).  I’m directing Vacation Bible Camp at our church this week, and then we’re taking 11 days of vacation/stay-cation.   I may write a post or two if I really feel like it…but don’t be entirely surprised if nothing shows up here for these two weeks.  I have a lot of posts in mind, so there should be some interesting things here to read after that! 🙂

 

Collage Friday: It Almost Feels Like Fall August 10, 2012

Filed under: Weekly Highlights — kirstenjoyhill @ 4:48 pm

Temperatures have finally moderated and it’s getting cooler at night.  We didn’t go to the pool at all this week.  The boys pulled out pants and long sleeve shirts (I guess 55 or 60 feels cold after weeks of lows in the 80s!).  We added back in another school subject for Miss M.  Slowly, it’s starting to feel a bit more like fall around here.  We even found a few leaves prematurely changing color!

We still have a few last hurrahs of summer left on our calendar though before we really dig in to our full “school year schedule.”  Next week we have Vacation Bible Camp at church.  I’m directing our VBC for the third year in a row.  I have to admit I have been kind of “phoning it in” in terms of my organizational duties based on work done in previous years — but that kind of caught up to me this week and I spent a lot of time answering emails (hence the lack of blog posts…too much computer time eaten up by that effort!).  Following our week of VBC, we have our vacation/staycation week 11 days.  We’ll be taking a couple of short trips out of town, plus doing a few more summer bucket list items here in the metro during this time Tony has off from work.

Here are a few highlights of our week:

1-2:  I love our annual block party for National Night Out.   NNO is very popular here — the city of Minneapolis makes it really easy for individual blocks to block off the street and have a party for a couple hours on the 1st Tuesday of every August.  Many, many blocks in our neighborhood participate! This year we were treated to a visit from the mounted police officers!  Doesn’t baby J look relaxed? All the kids have a great time playing with other kids on the block, on the one night of the year that it’s okay to ride your bike in the street!

3: This week’s “most creative” awards go to Mr. E for his collage of a “candy robot” and a collaborative effort from all the kids on this airplane.

4-6: Cooler temps meant more time outside doing things other than swimming.  We took the books and blanket outside for some school time (which never happened outside…too many distractions). Miss M tried rollerblading for the first time!

7. A sudden rainstorm led me to declare a spontaneous indoor picnic yesterday with cocoa, popcorn and finger foods for lunch.   I read three and a half chapters of our current history read aloud (Om-Kas-Toe: Blackfeet Twin Captures an Elkdog) while the kids enjoyed their “picnic”.

8.  Besides our history reading, I worked with Miss M on spelling  (LOE lesson #6), and Math (RightStart Level C, lessons 107-109).  These were our first new math lessons since May! Most of spelling and math were smooth sailing, and I think the bumps in the road we did have this week with school and otherwise (which on at least one day were not necessarily minor bumps) are helping reveal ways that I can be more effective in working with Miss M.

9. Today we spent almost all day with friends at a huge park about half an hour from our house — it has so many slides and ladders that its nickname is “Chutes and Ladders” (It’s really the Hyland Play Area).  I can’t imagine having done this while it was so hot earlier in the summer, but today’s weather in the 70s was perfect.

Have a wonderful weekend!  I hope to come up for air from Vacation Bible Camp long enough for at least a couple posts next week.  🙂

Linking up with Collage Friday and The Weekly Wrap-Up.

Homegrown Learners

 

Not-Back-to-School Blog Hop: Curriculum Week August 5, 2012

Filed under: Curriculum — kirstenjoyhill @ 9:45 pm

Not Back to School Blog Hop

It’s time for the annual “Not-Back-to-School Blog Hop” hosted by the iHomeschoolnetwork. This week it’s curriculum week!

I keep a page updated with our curriculum choices, so if you are finding this post later in the year you can check there to see if we continued with these choices!

Here’s a few highlights of what we’ll be using this year:

Family Subjects (everyone participates as they are able, at their own level):

History: United States History Year 1 (Beginnings to 1850-ish) — Using my own outline/plans

Science: Building Foundations of Scientific Understanding (BFSU) — Finishing Volume 1, Starting Volume 2 (Read here to find out a bit more about BFSU and about a resource you might find helpful Collaborative Pinterest Boards!).   We’ll also be reading some science biographies.

Bible Study and Character Building: Various resources from Doorposts books, Hero Tales book series, Leading Little Ones to God, and possibly other resources

Art Appreciation: Artistic Pursuits (Book 2 for Grades K-3)

 

Miss M, Age 8 (3rd grade, turning 9 in May 2013):

Math: RightStart Math Level C (Read here about why we like RightStart Math!)

Spelling/Writing/Grammar: Logic of English Essentials (Read some of my initial thought about LOE in this post)

Bible Study: Proverbs: A Bible Study for Kids by Kids (from BtoZ Publishing) + daily Bible reading

Handwriting: Cursive practice using copywork related to Bible, History and Science

Literature: Various read-alouds (projected list here) and assigned or free choice individual reading

 

Mr. E, age 5 (Kindergarten, turning 6 in March, 2013):

Phonics/Reading: Phonics Pathways + Easy readers for practice

Spelling: Learning Phonograms as presented in Logic of English Essentials, Possibly starting spelling lessons in LOE-E as the year progresses

Handwriting: A Reason for Handwriting Book A

Math: RightStart Math Level B

Literature: Assorted chapter book and picture book read-alouds

Fun Printables, Themes and Interest-Led studies as desired!

 

Mr K, age 3 (Preschool, turning 4 in February 2013)

Lots of Picture books (we’ll have a “classic picture book” of the week)

Letter of the Week Activities (Animal ABCs from 1plus1plus1Equals1, and other letter activities as desired)

Gentle intro to number concepts inspired by RightStart Math A

Fun Printables, Themes and Interest-Led studies as desired!  Possibly a “theme of the month” and a Holiday or Season of the month!

 

Baby J (Turning One on October 30th, 2012!)

Looking cute, listening to stories, having fun! 🙂

 

Don’t forget to visit the Not-Back-to-School Blog Hop page to find out what other homeschoolers are using this year for their curriculum!

 

Collage Friday: Historic Fun, Olympic Fun August 3, 2012

Filed under: Fun Stuff and Extras,Weekly Highlights — kirstenjoyhill @ 10:13 am
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Is it Friday already? This past week has just flown by! Last Friday, we visited Historic Ft. Snelling.  This living history site recreates what the fort was like when it was first built around 1820:

We enjoyed talking to the “soldiers”, learning about washing, school days, the blacksmith’s shop and more.  Miss M’s favorite area of the fort was learning about children’s games of the 1820s.  The boys’ favorite was the infantry drill and seeing the “soldiers” shoot their guns (it was loud, as you can see in the middle picture!).  The boys also joined the soldiers for a march around the quad.  After our visit to Fort Snelling in the morning, we stopped by Ikea for lunch (as you can see in the bottom right corner picture of the kids with the Ikea Snoopy house).

We rounded out our busy day with a stop on the way home at a discount store we rarely visit (that would be the one whose initials are W.M.) for a couldn’t-pass-it-up deal of glue sticks for ten cents each.  I bought 50 — hopefully I don’t wish I had bought 100 before the next year is up!  We use a lot of glue around here!

And then of course on Friday night, we started doing what almost everyone else in the world is doing this week…watching the Olympics:

We let the kids stay up super late on Friday night to see the whole opening ceremonies.  I made up special “Olympic Packets” for the kids with bingo games, coloring sheets and other activities to use while watching the opening ceremonies and other sports over the two weeks of the games!

We’ve probably watched 1-2+ hours of Olympics each day — very different from our normal TV habits!  But since it only comes around once every two years to have some kind of Olympics to watch, it seems worth it.   Miss M’s favorites so far are rowing and gymnastics.  The boys like fencing, shooting, whitewater canoeing and archery.  For some odd reason, everyone also really liked water polo.  🙂  We are all looking forward to track and field, and Miss M can’t wait for equestrian jumping.

We did do a little bit of school this week (but no pictures made it to the collage!)…I tried to keep spelling fun and we started a new history read aloud.  I’ll have posts coming (I hope) next week about what we’ve read so far in our first three-ish weeks of US History and the ideas I thought of to keep review and practice fun with Logic of English.

It wouldn’t be the Hill family getting interesting in something without spontaneous crafts and activities.  😉  Miss M made some nice Olympic rings to hang up.  Mr. E gets the creativity gold medal this week for his picture of a sport he created (“A guy stands on a really high bar with a really heavy weight in one hand and bombs in the other hand.  That’s a really hard sport, mom!”).  He also started the kids on a “Duplo Olympics” by setting up Duplo Synchronized Diving.  Miss M followed this up with Duplo Gymnastics (each aparatus was represented!).  The kids also did regular diving, archery, shooting and airplane tricks (Mr. E’s other suggested addition to the Olympic line-up).

Mr. K finally had some success in the potty department this week (after four not-so-successful months, we took the last two months or so off).  Miss M dressed in a rather unusual costume to present Mr. K with a gold medal for his efforts (and Mr. E followed up by presenting him with a bronze medal as well).

Miss M gets the family gold medal for swimming and diving! After much hard work she passed her swim test at the pool (25 yards of the front crawl) to be able to use the diving area for the first time! Yea!

Finally, Baby J gets the gold medal for “Most improved at Locomotion”.  🙂  We wished Baby J a happy Nine Months Old on Monday.  While he isn’t crawling yet, he certainly qualifies as “mobile.”  This week he became proficient enough at scooting on his bottom to move from room to room, pull books off the book shelves, attempt to chew on cords, and discover the joy of pulling plastic bowls out of the drawer.   Let the selective baby-proofing and teaching-of-“no touch” begin!

Linking up with…Collage Friday and the Weekly-Wrap-Up

!

Homegrown Learners
 

Book Discoveries this Week: Little House on Rocky Ridge series (books 1-3) August 2, 2012

Filed under: Books — kirstenjoyhill @ 8:14 am
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I really like working on a series of books for read-alouds with Miss M in the summer — especially when I already own the books.  It’s nice to just know what comes next and not have to think too hard or work too hard to find the next book.  🙂  Summer read-aloud time can be more sporadic for us since I read to Miss M right before bed, and there are more times of staying up too late to realistically do too much before-bed reading — so it’s nice not to be relying on timing our reading with books arriving from or needing to return to the library.

For this summer we decided on the “Little House on Rock Ridge” series by Roger Lea MacBride — aka The Rose Years series.  This eight book series features Rose, the daughter of beloved “Little House” characters Laura and Almanzo.

The first book in the series, Little House on Rocky Ridge, opens as the Wilders are leaving drought-ridden South Dakota in search of a better life in Missouri.   After their long horse and wagon journey, they need to find the perfect farm and get settled in before cold weather hits.

Once settled in their new farm, called Rocky Ridge, of course, Little Farm in the Ozarks and In the Land of the Big Red Apple continue the story of the family settling in and trying to develop a prosperous farm.  Rose goes to school, makes friends, learns life lessons (all the stuff you might expect in a “Little House” sort of a book).

Fans of the original “Little House” series will probably enjoy these books as well, though they don’t quite have the same classic quality to me as Laura Ingalls Wilder’s books.  It’s hard for me to put my finger on exactly what it is that makes me feel that way about these books.  I did find it somewhat tiresome that some incidents from the original series are “re-told” in the Rocky Ridge series books in the form of family stories being told to Rose.  While I’m sure this is helpful background to a small number of readers who didn’t read the other series first, I could have done without those passages.

Unlike many of the books in the original Little House series, the early books in the Rock Ridge series take place one right after another with very little elapsed time in between each book — or no elapsed time in the case of books #3 and #4!  We started book #4, On the Other Side of the Hill, just before the Olympics started (completely distracting us from getting any bedtime reading aloud accomplished!) and it starts literally hours after book #3 ends!  Reading the books one right after another also makes it feel odd that the background of some characters or key incidents are re-told in the text of each book.  I suppose this is necessary for readers who may take longer breaks between each book or jump into the series mid-way, but it felt awkward to me.  I can’t remember any moments like that in the original series (but we did take longer breaks between some of those books, so maybe I’m just forgetting about it!).

While I don’t usually go out of my way to plan any activities to go along with our bedtime read-alouds, I couldn’t resist buying a can of hominy after reading about the Wilder family making hominy in Little Farm in the Ozarks.   Everyone in the family liked this not-common-around-here dish.  We also spied a copy of McGuffey’s Third Reader in a gift shop last week — Rose’s class in school reads out of this book in Little Farm in the Ozarks and Land of the Big Red Apple.  It was fun to show Miss M what Rose’s book would have looked like!

Miss M is thoroughly enjoying these books — to the point where I am wondering if she will complain when we get closer to the end of August and I will want to move on to our new “school year” list of read-alouds.   Maybe I’ll just let her take the rest of the books we don’t read before the end of the summer and she can read them on her own (except that I do kind of want to find out what happens to Rose too!).

I’m linking up with Read Aloud Thursday @ Hope is the Word!