How was your November?
We had a month filled with lots of family gatherings. We did a lot less outside activities than last month, which felt wonderful! With lots of holiday projects and things we want to do at home, we’re all in the mood to just chill out and hang at home.
We played a few new games this month (look at my review of Totally Tut- a really fun game!) and read lots of fun Thanksgiving books. I learned so many new things this month, too – how Thanksgiving became a holiday, how to make a battery work by immersing positive and negative electrodes in an aqueous medium, what makes something commutative, the similarities between many African folktales and other folktales around the world.
Learning is always an adventure!
Books – Together
Get Well, Good Night!, A Kiss for Little Bear, Little Bear, Father Bear Comes Home– Jared’s reading
Pardon the Turkey: how Thanksgiving became a holiday
Turkeys, Pilgrims, and Indian corn: The Story of the Thanksgiving symbols
Thanksgiving at the Tappletons
The Great Turkey Heist (A Boxcar Children book)
The Thanksgiving Mystery – Scooby Doo
A Ghost Tale for Christmas Time – A Magic Treehouse Book
Rags and Riches: Kids in the Time of Charles Dickens – A Magic Treehouse Research Guide
Rabbit Makes a Monkey of Lion: a Swahili Tale
The Value of Dedication: The Story of Albert Schweitzer (a ValueTale book)
Misoso: Once Upon a Time Tales from Africa
Looking for Miza: The True Story of the Mountain Gorilla Family Who Rescued One of Their Own
Ashanti to Zulu: African Traditions
The Classic Tale of Ginger and Pickles
Alexa’s Reading List
Doterra Oils Book –I’ve been using Doterra Oils for almost a year now. I’ve turned Alexa into a little natural doctor, too, I think! She will sit on the couch for an hour, pouring over the book, learning the healing properties of different oils.
The Return of the Indian – She stopped reading this book halfway through. It wasn’t that she didn’t like reading it that much; it’s just an aunt gave us a huge bag of books about animals and she wanted to start reading those right away.
Jared’s Reading List
Spiderman and Friends: Sharing and Caring for All
TV/DVDS
Episodes of Pound Puppies
Episodes of Little House on the Prairie Season 4
Episodes of Transformers
Tutenstein: vol 3 The Fearless Pharaoh
Why Mosquitoes Buzz in People’s Ears: and more African tales
Alvin and the Chipmunks: A Thanksgiving Celebration
Thank You Sarah: The Woman Who Saved Thanksgiving
National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation
Shrek the Halls Christmas Special
Limney Snicket’s A Series of Unfortunate Events
Judy Moody & the Not Bummer Summer
Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone
Safety Smart Science With Bill Nye the Science Guy: Electricity
Physical Science for Children Volume 1
Games/Puzzles/Kits
Do & Discover Enviro Battery – Don’t buy this set! This is the second Do and Discover Science set we tried where many of the experiments didn’t work. I would have been more upset if we would have bought this kit ourselves (Alexa received it as a birthday present earlier in the year). The experiments with the digital watch battery worked fine. We learned how to make a battery work by connecting zinc and copper plates into a aqueous medium like a potato, lemon or water. But all four sound chip experiments failed which makes me think they gave us a defective sound chip.
Reader’s Digest Q & A Electronic Game This is a really old game I received when I was 8 or 9. It’s a trivia type game.
The Life of Fred: Butterflies Chapters 10-19 Have I said before how much we love Fred? We love him!!
Life of Fred: Cats Chapters-1-8
Heroica Game: Cavern of Naztuth- A Lego Game
National Geographic Bubblegum Lab– We bought this completely sealed set at a thrift store. It was fun to make, but the gum tasted awful! I learned hands-on how important the exact temperature and amount of mixing is necessary in chemistry. It’s definitely an exact science. We are very interested in checking out the other science sets by National Geographic.
Illustory: Publish Your Story– This is a wonderful little $25 kit! The kids and I worked hard together (three hours a day for a week) to write and illustrate a book for my one year old nephew for Christmas. It was an excellent way for them to learn about story structure. You’re limited to 12 pages with twenty words on a page, so we had to plan out our scenes, learn about the value of choosing just the right words, and how to illustrate the story so it highlights the most important or visually appealing moment of the text.
In a few weeks we’ll open our own hard cover copy of the story we created. I’m so excited for the kids to hold a real book in their hands that they created themselves. The book will also have an author page at the end with their picture.
Candy Land & Chutes and Ladders – So much fun to play games we haven’t played in years J
At Home Fun
Outside: collecting firewood with Steve, riding bikes and scooters, playing on the swings and slide
Inside: lots of wrestling with Steve, figure and Lego pretend play, baking brownies, making a whirlpool in the bathtub, painting, dressing up in different costumes, practicing cartwheels
Created a “gymnastics studio” in the living room complete with a handstand, backbend and cartwheel station, balance beam station (which was really the back of the couch), and bars area
Memorizing Bible verses for Awanas, rediscovering the walkie-talkies (this has been providing hours of fun!)
Playing with the neighbor’s new puppy – The kids always want to run over next door, knock on the door, and see if the puppy can come out to play. I don’t think we’ll be able to hold out on getting a dog much longer!
Signed up for Six Flags Read to Succeed Program– If you live near a Six Flags amusement park, you can register online for this program for free. All your kids do is read for fun for six hours between now and March 1st. They also will need to record each book they read and how many hours they spent reading each book (or comic, magazine, ect) You and your children will each receive a free ticket to the park! It is easily worth $75 for us.
Math Games
Totally Tut -This is an awesome addition, subtraction, multiplication and division game! It can be challenging even for adults.
Here’s a description of the game I took from Amazon:
The object is to fill your pyramid with triangle pieces by creating accurate math problems. To begin, you draw and place one “answer” number at the top of the pyramid. For example, if your answer number is 4, you will come up with various ways to get to the number 4 using the triangles in your hand (for example, 8 – 5 + 1) to fill your pyramid. The player who completes the first pyramid is the winner. There is a great deal of strategic thinking involved, because you can steal or swap numbers from your opponents to help you win.
My kids are right at the edge of being able to do the game on their own, so we usually play in teams with Steve. For now we are sticking with the addition and subtraction, but it can also be played using multiplication and division.
Out of the House Activities
Co-op Group at the Library:
– Started to make up a trivia game about the solar system. Wrote down questions someone would need to answer if they were to guess what planet someone was describing
– Three experiments about space movement from Janice VanCleave’s Astronomy for Every Kid – Speedy (determine the effect of distance on orbiting planets), On the Move (determine why planets continue to move, and Spinner (determining why planets move smoothly around the sun)
– Book Club discussion about Treasure Island
– Played with water beads
Weekly: Library Visits, Grocery Shopping, Church, Gymnastics, Swimming Lessons, Awanas
Backyard Safari Program at the Lakeview Nature Center –We looked at beetles and played with meal worms. The woman running the program read a story about the life cycle of butterflies and moths. Then we walked around the pond to hunt for signs of wildlife. I learned that the leaf that we had brought in the house a month earlier with the little bumps on it- which I thought were little seeds – were really the eggs of insects called gall……ooops!
Shedd Aquarium – We went with a large homeschool group. Every year we try to get to the Sheed and see their newest exhibit. First we saw the Oceanarium Show featuring beluga whales. After lunch we saw the Jelly Fish and Wild Reef Exhibit. It was fascinating the watch the jelly fish and learn more about them, but it was a very, very crowded day. There were over 1,500 kids in school groups alone!
Attended a performance of A Wrinkle in Time at DePaul’s Merle Reskin Theater
Biked ride to the playground
Biked to the new River walk area twice with Steve – rode down the hill and walked down by the river
Went to the vote with me and Steve (We did the paper ballots and they let the kids mark our votes down)
Festival of Lights Parade on Michigan Avenue downtown – We hadn’t been downtown to see the parade since before the kids were born. I’m glad we went, but it was very, very crowded. We had to hold the kids up the entire time (at 6 ½ years old, they’re getting a bit heavy J) My favorite part of the evening was watching the fireworks go off across the Chicago River.
Thanksgiving Day – We spend a wonderfully relaxing day at my sister’s house with my parents, brother, grandmother and my brother-in-laws mother. The kids and I made Oreo cookie Turkeys and Chocolate Marshmallow Pilgrim Hats for dessert (It took 3 hours to make the day before- the kids lasted about an hour and a half; then I was on my own to finish the rest. I think we’ll take a break from doing this next year!)
We had beautiful weather so the kids played on the swing set with their cousin, wrestled in the grass with Steve and watched the Polar Express.
Our annual Day After Thanksgiving Tradition – Every year we pick out our tree, bring it home, string lights, put up the Christmas village and snow, decorate the tree with ornaments while listening to Christmas music, and drink eggnog while watching our first Christmas movie of the season. This year was the first year Jared helped Steve put of the outside lights on the house. He was so proud to climb up the ladder by himself!
Picked out Alexa’s flower girl dress with their aunt and grandma
Steve’s sister and her fiancé came over for dinner. After dinner we went upstairs and played some pretend and wrestling games before they left.
Attended a performance of The Tortoise and the Hare & The Ugly Duckling at the Tivoli Theater
An afternoon with Grandma and Granddad – They put together a wooden airplane and went to the park to fly it in a field.
An afternoon with my mom– Jared played checkers against Papa- and beat him once!, Alexa played online Scrabble with Grammy, drew a railroad track on the garage floor and played train, helped with some handyman chores: cut a piece of wood, caulked holes, cut up pieces of old carpet, mopped the basement.
An evening with Steve’s family- We met at Steve’s brother’s house with his parents and two sisters. All the cousins played lots of pretend games together and looked at pet hermit crabs. An aunt gave Alexa and Jared lots of new books to take home
On the Computer, Kindle or I-Phone
Kindle: Angry Birds (Space, Star Wars -much excitement around our house when this came out!) Dungeon Hunters, iStory Book, Checkers, The Sims 3 Freeplay, The Secret of Grisly Manor, Dream Sleuth, Bad Piggies
PC Games: My Amazing Human Body by DK Publishing
Zoo Tychoon 2
Computer: The Sims 3 Pets Demo,www.dogchannel.com , www.fishchannel.com , www.horsechannel.com, www.pbskids.org,
Sheppard’s Software– Thanks Tereza from Creating Treasures for this tip! Alexa and Jared really liked all the math games here.
HEV Project spelling videos – I was browsing the videos on this site when Alexa looked over my shoulder and the spelling videos caught her eye. She wrote out all the spelling words to the first video on her own and requested that we do these videos together during our daily activity time.
I Phone: Pet House
Photo Credit: gordsam
What were some of your favorite activities from November?