Anything is School…And School Can Be Anything

For writing today, Lincoln wrote an informative piece about his new pet. He took most of the pictures himself, and was really excited to use real pictures on his project.

And, as promised, here is the Harry Potter Book Report in it’s entirety.


And I never got around to posting about the Science Class I taught the other week on Mollusks and Crustaceans. I read them a book about each, then we did a crossword puzzle, and a paper where we cut out pictures and sorted them under the correct categories. Then for our fun activity, I taped everyone’s four fingers together so they had claws like crabs, and had them eat their snacks that way. 


Also, we set a goal with Lincoln a little while ago, that if he read 1,500 pages we would buy him a book of his choosing. He was super excited about it. It took him about 10 days to meet this goal. Faster than I anticipated, I'll be honest. But he did it, and I was very proud of him. He and I went on a special trip to the book store, just the two of us, and I showed him where the chapter books were, and we spent about an hour and a half paging through books, and trying to decide on one that was just right.

 Finally he chose Geronimo Stilton The Journey Through Time. The Geronimo Stilton series is his new favorite series. Once he finished all the Magic Tree Houses, he asked the librarian to help him find another good series to read (while I was helping Ivan look something up in the computer, it made me laugh that Linc didn't want to wait for me, and went and found a librarian instead.) and she recommended this one. It's great. And there are about a million books in the series, so it should keep us going for awhile. Each book is about a hundred pages long (except The Journey Through Time, it's a special addition and is about 320 pages long), and it takes Lincoln about 45 minutes to read one. He's been going through about one a day for the last couple of weeks. They are cute and humorous, they have funny pictures, and use cool fonts for key words in paragraphs. I like them, Lincoln likes them, and Ivan even likes them when he can convince Lincoln to read one out loud to him.

For reading out loud, Lincoln is in the process of reading the first Harry Potter book to either Aaron or I. One of us listens to him read for 20-30 minutes each night. He is half-way through the book. I think the fact that we did it as a family read aloud first is really helping him. He doesn't have to spend a long time trying to figure out how to pronounce names and things, he can just read. We are trying to focus on vocab, and really encourage him to stop and ask what a word means if he doesn't know. This is going well I think.

We've made a small shift in Ivan's reading too. We've discovered that he prefers to read at night, as opposed to during the day. I think it's because at night both Aaron and I are home, so after we put Ollie and Del to bed, one of us can take Linc and the other can take Ivan, and we can listen to them read in a quiet place with no distractions. Whereas if we read in the daytime, it's me and all four kids, chaos everywhere, and lots of noise, and interruptions while Ivan is trying to read. The distractions frustrate him, until he flat out refuses to read anymore. It's a night and day difference (haha!) when we read at night. He's much more agreeable, reads more material at a faster pace, and enjoys it when he's done. We've made more progress in the last couple of weeks of night reading, than we have in the past couple of months of day time reading. So I think we'll stick to night time reading for Ivan.