Do the Summer Reading Stretch
In our family we have:
- 1 ten year old who loves to read a great variety of books, including biographies for fun
- 1 eight year old who loves to read and has greatly improved in her endurance and skills in the past two years, but who still gravitates toward the Magic Treehouse series if left to her own wiles. She resists books that might be a bit challenging.
- 1 six year old who is struggling, still on the upside of the slope, and I’m underneath giving him a leg up.
- And a two year old who thinks she can read chapter books.
For the struggling readers in our family we’ve devised the summer saturday morning bookstore which I’ve written about in the past and I might share about again soon.
But to enlarge the reading world of our elder two, I found this idea for Book Bingo. Inspired by the idea, I created two bingo cards with a mixture of categories and specific book titles.
When the girls read five books in a row, they get to pick an extra book from our saturday bookstore. I like to keep reading rewards related to reading, so a grab bag filled with books would also be great. But you might have ideas that better suit your family.
I chose the types of books and book titles based on my individual children, their strengths and weaknesses.
I then laminated the cards and gave them smiley stickers to mark the boxes as they read a book.
I also created a list with a few recommended books for the categories on the Bingo card. Many of these I haven’t read, I just pulled them from the Sonlight booklist, which I like to refer to occasionally.
You can take a closer look at the Bingo Cards by downloading them here: Book Bingo.
100 Faces: A Summer Goal
It’s true I just posted something not too long ago about being a relaxed, non-homeschooling mama over the summer. But even as I wrote it I knew that too many days in our house + our number of children(4) + their ages (2, 6, 8, 10) + no goals for the day would = a dead end of bickering.
And so it has.
Introducing the first goal imported into our summer: 100 Faces.
Toward the end of the school year I happened across an art book that got my creative energy whizzing. I tucked the excitement away until summer.
Drawing Lab: 52 Creative Exercises to Make Drawing Fun is a goldmine of art projects which require pretty basic art supplies and a willingness to get loose. Most of the exercises are designed to break the artist out of rigid perfectionism and just, well, in some cases scribble. But scribble with a goal!
For example, the first exercise in the book is “Drawing Cats in Bed” and you literally get cozy in your bed and start drawing cats. There are ideas for drawing from clay, creating from ink blots, and using the cracks in the sidewalk to find the shape of your drawing.
If all that sounds too abstract or vague-it’s not. Each project has clear guidelines. I’m telling you, check this book out.
Before I get to the summer goal, here’s an example of another project inspired from this book (completed before school ended). We wrote poems about dreams and decorated with journal page with the exercise on page 30 in Drawing Lab. First you paint various blobs and lines with three colors and then you look for shapes within the colors and trace them with a fine tip permanent marker. The style fit well with the dream theme.
I have one particular child (the 8 year old, nickname Jellyfish) who loves to draw and loves to draw perfectly, the first time. She even believes that her first drawing of a particular subject will always be her best drawing so she does not like to sketch roughly or do exercises that don’t get to the final product. I thought of her immediately when I looked at the projects in this book.
After a a little Groupon shopping spree at the art store I flipped open the book to see how we could begin. And I found the challenge on page 50.
Create one hundred faces by the end of the summer. I added in the “by the end of the summer” and I also told them that was my goal but they didn’t have to do it-it’s summer, it’s not an assignment.
They all decided to do it. So we cut our fresh, crisp watercolor paper into the recommended 4 x 5 inch rectangles. And I flipped to page 36 to give us a start on our first face.
“Wrong-handed portraits” are exactly how they sound in the title. With a fine point black permanent marker, using your non-dominant hand, draw the face of someone in the same room. Spend more time looking at the person than the lines on the paper.
I chose to do this project first in honor of Jellyfish, because she has a cast on her dominant hand. So we matched her and all used our wrong hand.
Note: Jellyfish mostly wanted to draw people from her head during these projects, not people from her actual life. I said sure (it’s summer, no big mama-teacher rules).
Jellyfish Draws her Brother
Mookie Draws her Dad
After Wrong-handed portraits, we moved on to Modigliani style, page 64. (Jellyfish, of course, made wrong-handed Modigliani portraits).
Mookie Draws the Woman from the Post Office
And the final style for the day was One Liner Portraits, page 56. Without lifting our pen from the paper, we completed a portrait from life or photograph (or an 8 year old’s imagination).
Jellyfish Draws the Guy in her Head
Mookie Draws her Grandad
Note: I didn’t watch our six year old at all. I let him go and just do what he wanted to, because sometimes it’s hard for him to track along with our art projects and he gets frustrated. If he was creating happily and freely, I was happy.
In our future I see “At the coffee shop” portraits, Eyedropper faces, Collaboration Portraits and More.
Because we’re still really excited about the vast variations of beauty in birds, we decided, why not alternate the faces with birds and do 50 birds/50 faces? Our 10 ten year old got started.
Drawing Lab is not written specifically for children, but it’s evident from our first attempts that the projects are adaptable. Do be careful with your youngers not to give them challenges way beyond their comprehension or it might lead to frustration and a refusal to do art. My 6 year old didn’t like the assignment I mentioned above with the splotches of paint that we used with our dream poems-the idea of finding images to trace inside the color was too abstract for him.
Six year old Drummer Boy draws Happily and Freely
Learning Near a Big City
I grew up in a city but my heart belonged to the beach on the edge of the city.
I moved to another city for college and another city for marriage and it’s no New York, but it’s a great city and we love it.
One of our favorite questions to ask each other is “Do you want to live in the city or the country?”
None of us can answer with a distinct yes or no.
I love the idea of wide open spaces for my children to roam, of a slower life, of a closer relationship with nature.
I also love my library, my coffee shop, a short drive to the grocery store, and a life without wildlife that gets too friendly.
No matter how we might answer the question in the hypothetical, our trip to Chicago this past week had me mentally planning school as if all of the great places we visited were just around the corner.
First we visited Oak Park, and took a walk around the neighborhood, picking out our “new” house. A lot of the houses looked prime for secret crawl spaces and hidden rooms. The neighborhood is also home to the studio of Frank Lloyd Wright and many houses designed by him can be found nearby. We dragged our hot and sweaty selves into our friend’s favorite bookstore. I’ve always dreamed of walking from our house to a coffee shop, park, and library. (That’s one point for the city side of the question).
For the rest of the week we parked ourselves in Batavia, an hour out of Chicago and surrounded by great little towns and more than we could do in our short time (add 4 kids and two tired parents).
We were all impressed with the Dupage Children’s Museum. If you’ve been to a children’s museum, you tasted a piece of this three story exploratorium. Famous art lined the walls with correalating activities in color, sound, and structure. In my head I planned our return trips. First we’d study color and shadows and head back to that section next time. Then we’d study construction, a unit on wood and tools and head back to the construction exhibit. Then we’d come back and just explore the section with giant tools to build marble runs. If we lived there.
The next day we took the train to the Field Museum.
The Museum blew us all away and we didn’t even get to see two of the exhibits because there is so much to see. Oh my, the Underground Adventure where you get to see what’s under the soil as if you’re the size of an ant. Our six year old still sincerely believes he was shrunk to half and inch for thirty minutes of his life!
The egyptians, the native americans, the dinosaurs, the animals, oh my.
My favorite area was the section on North American Birds. Every single bird was represented. Birds we had only read about and now we got to examine them up close. I wanted to get sketch books and come back-every week! If we lived there.
And finally we visited the Aboretium. If you’re familiar with Nashville, this was like Cheekwood hiked up three levels. An amazing children’s section designed to get kids close to nature. A garden maze, and miles of trails. My friend asked me, “If you were a member here, how many times would you visit in the year?” Twice a month, or even better yet, once a week and that would be school for the day.
We’re not pulling up roots and moving out of Nashville, but I do wish we could pull up Nashville and move it atleast four hours closer to Chicago.
Summertime Mama
“Do you school all year round or just the normal school year?”
I pondered this question in those first few years and a older friend said something that’s always stuck and always led me to choose a true summer break.
“My kids have me as teacher mom all through the school year,” she said, “I’m always assigning tasks, telling them something they need to do. During the summer, they need me to just be Mom.”
Her simple explanation continues to resonate.
There was the spring that we had taken many breaks because of a medical issue with my Dad. I felt pressed to “finish” school, to work long into June, to keep going with Math through the summer. After several weeks of schooling in June, I realized we needed to stop. I needed to stop. And not look back at the books until August.
This morning, our second day of summer break, the 3 older kids played Monopoly until the toddler and I showed up for breakfast(around 9). I read aloud during breakfast, they ran off to do their morning chores, and then I surprised them by putting on a video. (Only a homeschool family watches Winged Migration, a documentary, for fun, but we did and the two year old acted out the flight patterns of birds. )
My 8 year old made a wise crack during the movie and couldn’t stop laughing at herself. I watched her, my eyes lingered on her, without thinking of what task I needed to remind her of, and I smiled. We then watched the two year old do acrobatics on the living room chair, and I didn’t have to think once about sending her off with an older sibling so I could do math with the 6 year old.
After a leisurely lunch they headed off to play their marathon monopoly game. As I sat here to begin this blog, I realized that the 3 siblings hadn’t fought once during the game over the last few days. My dark mom side told me that they would fight soon enough, after the luxury of less schedule turned into bored picking and fighting. And then I stopped myself from predicting doom and I remembered my daughter’s laughter from earlier and I thought,
Let’s just take it day by day.
My children need me to have less outside goals and desire just to be with them and delight in them.
So what about math and reading? We have a creative way to incorporate reading into our summer and some math games we’ll play so those multiplication and adding skills don’t get lost in the backyard pool(though monopoly seems to be doing the trick right now!).
What about you? Do you school in the summer? Do you have any secrets for spending time with your children during the school year without always having an agenda or reminder?
Discovering a Nothing to Do Kind of Day
We happened upon a sweet picture book that I wanted to share with you. We’ve been happening upon a lot of great picture book finds now that summer has begun and I’m not pulling chapter books for school. I’d forgotten the joy of walking through the aisles and pulling out a book with great illustrations, maybe something I’ve never seen before or maybe an old friend.
Tonight’s surprise grab from the library bag was Nothing to Do by Douglas Wood and Illustrated by Wendy Anderson Halperin.
Nothing to Do begins likes this:
“Once in a while, along comes a day when there is nothing-absoultely, positively nothing to do.”
Which at first sounds similiar to our children’s cry of boredom, but it’s actually the voice of a boy who’s celebrating the day that has no “school. homework. dance class. soccer practice. no anything.” And he embarks upon a day of true childhood fun, entreating the person with the “big shoes”(aka, us, the adults) to give it a try.
With whimsical illustrations, the girls and I were reminded of the potential of a There’s Nothing to Do Today kind of day.
In this book Halperin chooses six patterns from nature and uses them as the base of each picture. We might try our own take on her ideas tomorrow. With pure happenstance(I didn’t even know what the book was about before we opened it) waiting on the printer was a list of things to do when you’re bored that I’d printed out the night before. The girls ran and grabbed the list, giggling at “organize your room” and “walk the dog”(mom, we don’t have a dog).
It turns out we’re familiar with Halperin’s illustrations through another series from the summer. If you enjoy her illustrations try the Cobble Street Cousins by Cynthia Rylant, illustrated by Halperin as well. Be prepared for your kids to ask if they can start their own cookie company in the neighborhood.
The next book kept our good mood rolling,
Abe Lincoln Crosses a Creek: A Tall, Thin Tale(Introducing His Forgotten Friend) by Deborah Hopkinson
If you like this one try another book by Hopkinson,
Apples to Oregon Being the (slightly) True Narrative of How a Brave Pioneer Father Brought Apples, Peaches Pears, Plums, Grapes, and Cherries(and Children) Across the Plain Illustrated by Nancy Carpenter
Both are based on true events but told with tall tale humor.
Enjoy your day, reading or doing nothing.