Some books are just fun. This is one of those books. I’ve lost track of how many times we’ve already read it and how many times Caroline has recited just the title.
She’s also memorized quite a bit of the inside text. I suspected this would be a winner because funny animals are all the rage right now. 
We started doing preschool this week and so far we are off to a good start. Caroline is excited each morning to come down and see what is planned.
I have to say that none of these ideas are original to me. I’ve done a lot of surfing, looking for ideas that I thought would work well for us. And I am keeping it pretty low-key to start with. My main goal is to get off to a fun start with this. Yes, Caroline will be learning as well. But given her personality, my biggest goal is to get her hooked on learning and finding it enjoyable.
So here is what we are doing…
We set up a corner in the dining room for our school area. There is absolutely nowhere else in the house to do it. I would dearly love to have a separate room, but that just isn’t meant to be. I have literally an entire room’s worth of stuff in our basement from my teaching days and since having Caroline. It’s frustrating, but I’m just trying to make the best of the situation.
So we purchased a table and chairs which we love. (That’s Caroline above sitting at it the first day we bought it, trying it out with a coloring page.) Bought it at Toys’RUs and it is great! It should fit Caroline for at least a few years. We also purchased a small bookcase. (We already had twelve in various sizes in the house, but they were all being used…) And a palm tree. (More on that later.)
The rolling cart is an idea I got from Confessions of a Homeschooler. I am also using her Letter of the Week Preschoool Curriculum. It was only $10 and it is worth every penny just for how it has so many ideas I can quickly use and print off. The curriculum is written to be used with one new letter a week. We’ll probably do two a week only because one a week will be dragging it out too much for Caroline. Some of the activities are too easy for Caroline, but there is plenty there to give me a good foundation on which to plan around.
So the rolling cart. If you go to her post The Workbox System, you will see some examples of how she organizes her children’s work each day. Since Caroline and I are both a sucker for anything organizational I knew this would totally appeal to both of us. I wish I had had the video camera on when we set up the rolling cart (before it was even filled). Her eyes got big and she could hardly wait to start pulling the drawers open and rolling it around. Now the first thing she does every morning when we come downstairs is open all the drawers to see what is in there!
Ok, so the palm tree now residing in my formal dining room… Yes, it is a Chicka Chicka Boom Boom
We’ll be using Chicka Chicka Boom Boom along with the Letter of the Week Curriculum. We’re making a lapbook and I’ll post about that shortly as well.
Let’s see… What else…
Oh, we are making these adorable little foam letters. This is where I am really grateful for David. I could never cut these out and make them look anything remotely like the picture. I just gather the supplies, print out the picture from the internet, hand the stuff to him, and he cuts all the pieces that I need. Gotta love being married to an artist!
So here is Caroline proudly showing off her alligator!
Well, there are a number of other neat little ideas I plan on sharing, but work is calling me so I should stop here. I definitely won’t be posting pictures of everything we do, but I will share some of the ideas I find in case anyone else would like to use them.
So far I’m pleased with how things have gone. One thing I know for sure. Anything that uses a dry erase marker or scissors and glue will be a big hit. She loves them both. And I’m also pretty sure that Caroline is going to be a lefty. She goes back and forth, but she almost always writes with her left hand now and cuts with her right. So I’ll have the added challenge of trying to teach a southpaw how to write!
I recently wrote an article highlighting three favorite pictures books that teach children about courage. Each one presents the idea of courage in a slightly different way. Each book is very different from the others in terms of writing and illustrations so there is sure to be something to interest someone!
Brave Irene is a cute story about a little girl who battles a raging blizzard to help her mother keep a promise.
The Empty Pot is a lovely story about Ping, a young boy faced with a difficult decision. This book ranks very high on my list of picture books.
When Jessie Came Across the Sea is a gorgeously illustrated book about an older girl/young woman who is selected to come to the United States and what happens after she arrives.
All three are favorites that have a permanent space on my bookshelf and all come highly recommended!
Enjoy! 
Items of interest in the news…
Attention, Gates: Here’s What Makes a Great Teacher from Education Week
Parents strive to temper screens’ pull from Boston.com
Union warns teachers not to break up playground fights from The Independent
We Need Less School, Not More by John Taylor Gatto
Graduate School in the Humanities: Just Don’t Do It from The Chronicle of Higher Education
Enjoy!
Growing up I was a voracious reader. But as I’ve admitted elsewhere, I’m not in any danger of being labeled a literary snob. I’m not much into reading all the classics that everyone says you have to read.
Frankly, I read for two reasons. One, I want to learn something about a particular topic. Two, to escape and relax.
I read for the pleasure of it. I think that is why I didn’t enjoy AP English very much. Too much analysis and picking apart what the author meant by this object or this symbolic metaphorical doohickey.
That’s just not really me.
So I found this article quite interesting: The Case for Slow Reading. From the article (bold mine):
Open any newspaper and you are likely to find a story of some school whose students have read a million, two million—some big number of pages. As a payoff, the teachers wear pajamas for a day, or the principal shaves his head or agrees to eat worms, a reward to the delighted students. Then Pizza Hut or some other franchise that sponsored the event hands out coupons for nonnutritious food to the voracious readers.
It’s all great fun, a good story, a terrific photo op. But something bothers me about this picture—it’s as though reading has become a form of fast food to consume as quickly as possible, just one more cultural celebration of speed.
This association of good reading with speed permeates our schools, from the hugely popular Accelerated Reading Program, to “nonsense word fluency” tests in which young children have to decode “words” at a rate of more than one per second, to standardized tests in which reading is always “on the clock.” To be quick is to be smart; to be slow is to be stupid.
As a confessed slow reader, I would like to make a case for slowness. By slowness, I don’t mean the painful, laborious decoding some students must do or the plodding march through some assigned novels that may take weeks. Any pleasure or success in reading requires fluency and the ability to read with some pace.
But there is real pleasure in downshifting, in slowing down. We can gain some pleasures and meanings no other way. I think of the high-speed trains in Europe that I always wanted to ride, ones that hurtle through the French landscape at more than 200 miles per hour—that is, until I learned that at these high speeds, even the distant scenery becomes a blur. The retina simply can’t take in a clear picture at that rate of movement.
The same thing can happen in reading. I’d like to explore what we miss when we define good reading as fast reading and to argue for what Ellin Keene has called “dwelling” in the texts we read.
Author and media theorist Neil Postman provides a foundation for this argument in his classic book, Teaching as a Conserving Activity (1979). Schools, Postman argues, should act on a thermostatic principle; a thermostat acts to cool when a room is too hot and heat when a room is too cool. According to Postman, schools should act to check—and not to imitate—some tendencies in the wider information environment. “The major role of education in the years immediately ahead,” he writes, “is to help conserve that which is necessary to a humane survival and threatened by a furious and exhausting culture” (p. 25).
I get the impression Caroline is going to have certain areas where she kind of ambles along at her own pace. She does not like to be rushed and, unless something changes in the coming years, I can see her as one of the children who is smart as a whip but does not do pressure-packed standardized testing very well.
Pressure-packed reading seems absolutely contradictory to me. Reading should be pleasurable and enjoyed at a leisurely pace.
So it will be interesting to see how this develops in our home. We are doing our best to live a quiet, simple life. We have found the pleasure of downshifting and slowing down. How that translates into Caroline’s education has yet to be seen. But I hope to give her the gift of loving and savoring reading.
