Kid Book Reviews

Ivan's Book Reviews

Two Book Reviews for Two Boys

Winding Down Slowly

 Our yard is still blooming. I'm obsessed with it. I love to be outside. I check my garden several times a day to see if any green things have poked through yet. Spinach and peas, and one or two beats!

peas

spinach

Our school days seem to be getting shorter and shorter and a lot less structured. Eventually, it'll just settle in to one eternal round of P.E. and outside time. :) I'm ok with it. I like that our learning has a cycle. Sometimes it's very structured and orderly, sometimes it's interest based, and sometimes it's free time to be outside or create or experience things.

There are so many ways to create. I've found that when I feel the need to create I turn to language arts. I read out loud to the kids more. We write together. We cut pictures out of magazines and make collages. When I'm feeling creative, I like the kids to be creative too, and I might show it by being more lenient and counting their desire to build with K'Nex as "school time".

Ollie has discovered the pattern blocks. :) I love his concentration face. I love how he gasps in delight when he picks out which shape goes where. I love that he's starting to want to be apart of what the big kids are doing. The other day he came running into my room while I was filming a couple of book reviews with Ivan, and insisted that he had book reviews to do too. I let him climb up in the chair and have a turn. It was adorable. (Just ignore Ivan being a goober in the background.)

Ever since our Redwoods trip, Ivan has been painstakingly working on a poetry book of his own entitled River and Rain. I got to see the finished product the other day. He put a lot of his heart into it. And I am in love with it.

And this last page coming up, it's my favorite. When he was working on it, he came to me and asked, "Mom how do you spell 'thum'"? At first I was confused, but then he said, "you know like when you see one of thum." So, I told him 'them' and didn't realize what he was doing until he showed my the page all finished. He recognized that sometimes in speech we pronounce 'them' as 'thum', and he rhymed it with drum. A slant rhyme! And although he probably couldn't give it that name if you asked him, he's recognizing it in language and using it in writing. This makes my little literary heart beat a little faster. :) And, of course, the eyes drawn on to the word 'see' are fantastic too.

Ivan has also picked back up on his reading goal. He did two book reports for me this week.

Adelia only has a month and a half left of her Kindergarten class. And although it has been a really good thing, I am ready for it to wind down. Getting her to do homework every day is not my favorite thing. Especially when some of the material she is supposed to be memorizing isn't on my priority list for Kindergartners. But the school has been great for her, and I'm glad we enrolled her. I'll do my best to push through 'til the end. (Even if that means bribing her with an M&M for every line of math facts she completes.

I have really been trying to work on descriptive language with the kids in our writing time. We did a fun activity last week that was sort of a clash between an art project and a writing assignment. We drew our hands on a piece of paper and wrote the word 'flowers' in the middle on the palm. Then on each finger we wrote different way you could describe a flower. Color, kind, feel, size, smell, other. Then we gave each of those categories a section. In the section we thought up descriptive words for the category heads. I encouraged them to make it as colorful as possible.

Ivan's

Lincoln's

Lincoln Reviews More Books

This kid is a reading machine! :) At least lately. He even took a break from his "20 Chapter books" to read a book for fun over Spring Break. It was funny though, because we were talking the other day and he started telling me how he thinks he kind of goes through stages, at first he really really likes to read and can do it all day, but after awhile, he gets a little tired of it and wants to go do something else for awhile. I told him I go through the same cycles too. I read, and read, and read, and read; but then I'll go for awhile without reading anything at all. I told him if he was getting tired, he could take a break from reading for awhile, that there was no time limit on our deal, and I didn't want him to get burned out. He said, "Ya, maybe...but I just really want to get my new book." So we'll see how it goes. Here are a few more book reviews from the books he's read in the last week.

Wonderful Flight to the Mushroom Planet by Eleanor Cameron

The Summer of the Swans by Betsy Byars

Wild Born: Spirit Animals Book 1 by Brandon Mull

Nathan Hale's Hazardous Tales #6: The Alamo All-Stars by Nathan Hale

First of all, I just have to say that Lincoln LOVES this series, and so do I (although I haven't actually read it myself) because Linc learns a TON of history facts without even realizing it. That being said, this is the one he read "for fun" over Spring Break. It didn't count towards his 20 books, because it's a graphic novel, and because it came in the mail after we were already a week into his reading challenge and we'd already established which books he was going to read. Lincoln graciously offered to do a book review of it anyways (after I bribed him with an ice cream cone) and here it is.

More Kid Book Reviews

Lincoln is working away at his goal of 20 chapter books. I'm actually quite impressed with his focus. I thought after the first few short books that he'd run out of steam. And he definitely isn't going as fast as her originally thought he would, but he is chugging along at quite a rate. He spends 2-3 hours a day reading. And I am content to let him. (You could say I'm a little burnt out with school at the moment. Yay for Spring Break next week!)


Fractions Equal Trouble by Claudia Mills

Stewart Little by E.B. White

The Sign of the Beaver by Elizabeth George Speare

James and the Giant Peach by Roald Dahl

"Let's Make a Deal."

On Friday morning, Lincoln came to me and said, "Mom, how about we make a deal? If I read 20 chapter books, you buy me a new book." Of course I took him up on his deal. :) And he spent the morning selecting chapter books that I approved of (I wanted the books to be in his reading level range, and I didn't want the list to be stacked with fantasy), writing down what order he wanted to read them in, and generally planning how he wanted to go about his task. These are the books he came up with:

His plans are making me giggle a little bit, but I love them, and plan on just sitting back and watching this all unfold, with him in control of it. He plans on reading 2 1/2 books per day. Also, since he got 10 Peeps in his Easter basket, he plans on eating one Peep after every two books that he reads as a reward.

Ivan decided he wanted in on this action as well, so he and I picked out 20 books at his reading level. But he's not as intense about it at the moment as Linc. And I'm not pushing. This is their thing, not mine. I'm throwing this under the category of project-based homeschooling (the same as Lincoln's robot project awhile back) where the kids are in charge of the learning and doing, and the parent just facilitates.

We also agreed that they would do an oral book report for every book that they read. My good friend and neighbor has a writing/reading blog, where she shares the things she's writing, and reviews things she's reading. As part of that, she has her kids do book review videos. I LOVE this idea! So, I'm borrowing it from her. I think doing book reports orally will help my kids be able to share all of their ideas and thoughts about the books they are reading without getting bogged down in the writing process. Sometimes (at this age especially) the writing process gets long, and they get frustrated with it, and their book reports end up being, "It was great. I liked it." And they don't explore what they liked about it, or why they would recommend it, or what the funny parts were, or things like that. Right now, I'd like to get them talking and thinking more about the books they are reading. We can work on writing about them later. And since my kids love to watch themselves on camera afterwards, my friend's idea to record the book reviews is genius! I will post both boys' book reviews as I get them. They accumulated quite a few over the weekend.

The Littles by John Lawrence Peterson

Beowolf: Usborne Young Reading series

 How Oliver Olson Changed the World by Claudia Mills

 The Adventures of Sinbad the Sailor: Usborne Young Reading Series

 7x9= Trouble by Claudia Mills

 The Call of the Wild by Jack London (Children's classic edition)

 The Water Horse by Dick King-Smith

 Jason and the Golden Fleece: Usborne Young Reading series