a new read aloud

We have been rocketing through read alouds lately! We ended up reading the Kit book I mentioned before in one sitting yesterday. We're still working on the lapbook though.

So, we were once again out of read alouds. Thankfully yesterday was library day. I know I'm a little slow, but I just realized that the chapter books also have holiday stickers on the spine. I have known that the picture books had these for years... but yesterday was the first day I had noticed them on the chapter books. This was a HUGE help in my search. The first book I pulled out with the Christmas Candy Cane sticker on the spine was this...

The Life and Adventures of Santa Claus

I had never heard of this book before. The book is GORGEOUS! The illustrations are just incredible. I had no idea that L. Frank Baum (the author of The Wizard of Oz books) had written a story about Santa Claus.

We're only about four chapters into the book but so far the kids are completely entralled by the story. Who wouldn't be though? It's a fabulous fairy tale set in a forest no mortal has ever entered, complete with wood nymphs, fairies and other mythical creatures.

I have to admit that I was a bit reluctant to read a book about the life of Santa at first. But after starting this book, I have no problem with it. It truly is written like a fairy tale where although it captures your imagination and you want, in your heart, for it to be true... it is just a little too fanciful for you to accept that it could be true. Does that make sense? I hope it does, at least a little :-)

We'll see how the rest of it goes, but so far we're loving it.

December Read Alouds

I know I have Farmer Boy listed on the right, but the kids voted to "pause" the book for the month and read Christmas books instead.

First of all... I got the bright idea to read A Christmas Carol aloud to the kids. See... Clara had chosen the Barbie Christmas Carol movie for her movie pick last weekend. Although I thought it was a well done movie, it was not quite the same story. The kids said that they would like to hear the real story, so I found our copy of the book and the shelf and started reading. Ugh.... the language was too much for them. Their eyes glazed over a page or two into the book.... so we abandoned the book. So they at least get some exposure to the actual story, I downloaded an audio recording of the story from Kiddie Records.

So, now I was without a Christmas book. On my next trip to the library I started looking around for a new read aloud. I ended up with two. First off is this book...

The Best Christmas Pageant Ever

So far, so good on this one. Although the kids in the book are so out of control that it gets to Alex a bit. It's a short book so I'm hoping we'll be getting to the "best" part of the Christmas Pageant so Alex can relax some.

The second book I picked up is this...

Kit's Surprise: A Christmas Story, 1934

We'll probably use the lapbook kit I got from CurrClick as we read the book. Needless to say, Clara is very excited about this read aloud.

The Nut Tapper

I mentioned last week that we were doing a Christmas/Nutcracker theme for this month...and that one of the things we had planned on seeing was The Nut Tapper (the field trip version). Well... we went last Thursday and had a fabulous time.

It wasn't like we had expected (somehow we had expected people tap dancing to the original ballet score) but we thoroughly enjoyed it. The show was bright and exciting with fabulous dancing, beautiful singing and infectious energy!

They followed the basic story of the Nutcracker.
With a battle between the Nut Tapper and the mouse king...
But they incorporated many different styles of dance... including Mexican Folk Dance...
and Flamenco...
The kids had a really great time.

another (free!) nutcracker resource...

The Nutcracker Suite for Children

I meant to post this yesterday but forgot all about. Okay... I didn't forget ALL about it, I thought about it and then couldn't remember where I had tucked it away on my hard drive after a fit of downloading a few months ago. Today I found it!

If you would like to download it too... I got it from Kiddie Records, it's week 50 of their 2006 list.

If anyone else out there is doing a Nutcracker study this month, I would love to see/read what you're doing as well!

a theme study for December

Okay... I wasn't going to do it. We were on a good roll with everything we were doing with school. The plan was to just keep on rolling with the norm through December. Well... that was before the tree went up and all of the Christmas stuff came out! We are going to keep going with our normal stuff (scaling back a bit on SOTW though) but we're going to be doing a special theme for the month. Since today is December first and this obsession just came to me on Saturday, it had to be something easy, something that I had resources for already so we could hit the ground running today.

After some brainstorming, I had an idea! See... this summer I got this "brilliant" idea (that was sarcastic) to create a ballet themed year long study for Clara since she LOVES ballet. It's easy finding curriculum ideas for Alex that goes along with what he loves since he loves building and engineering. Clara was tougher so I thought I would try a ballet theme. Well... I began acquiring materials but quickly realized once school started, that I didn't have enough stuff to do what I wanted.... so it was just sitting on a shelf labeled "Clara"... sigh.

BUT.... now, here I was looking for a theme for December... what better use of that stuff on the shelf than a Nutcracker study???

So, here are some of the resources we already had...

DK Read & Listen: Illustrated Book of Ballet Stories

This is a beautiful little book that includes all of the stories on CD. It includes several famous ballets, including the Nutcracker.

Favorite Ballets Coloring Book

Clara loves to color pages in this book as we do our read alouds... but thankfully, she had not gotten to the Nutcracker pages yet.

Nutcracker: The Music Game

We haven't played this yet... but I thought it could be fun.

And, so we don't overdo the ballet thing for Alex, we will add in some composer study...

Tchaikovsky Discovers America

This is another resource I had already purchased.... and now get to put to use!

Now on to other resources...

Again... to not overdo the ballet stuff for Alex, I thought we would expand this a bit and do a little "Christmas Around the World" by reading some about Christmas in Russia. I have these two books to pick up at the library...

Baboushka and the Three Kings


Christmas in Russia

Another motivation for this study is that over Thanksgiving we saw a preview of what looks like a beautiful production of the Nutcracker that is going to be on PBS HD.... Great Performances: Dance In America: San Francisco Ballet's Nutcracker. I couldn't find more info on it... but while looking through the Great Performances site, I found this which looks like fun....

Build and Color Your Own Nutcracker Stage Production

Add to all of this that we're going to see the Nut Tapper this week and the dance school that Clara goes to is putting on their own mini production of the Nutcracker... I think we'll be all Nutcrackered out by the end of December! :-)

Christmas Around the World

My theme for this week is Christmas Around the World since I knew we were going to the Museum of Science and Industry yesterday to see the Christmas Trees from Around the World and the Star Wars exhibit.

The day before we went I downloaded the podcasts found here. They include brief 45 second to minute and a half descriptions of the Christmas customs of each country. They don't specifically describe the trees at the museum so if you're doing a Christmas Around the World homeschool unit study, it could be a fun supplement. I loaded them onto my iPod for the kids to listen to at the museum. However, the podcasts are in alphabetical order by country which is not at all how the trees were arranged at the museum. Alex tried it out for a couple of trees and then gave up. We just read the signs on each tree aloud.

Here are some photos of some of the trees....



(loved this little origami guy!)



And here was our family's favorite tree...the tree form Poland.

Today we continued our Christmas Around the World study. But first we worked on our Hands of a Child lapbook on Snow that we had started. Today we learned about the different types of frost and how artificial snow is made. The kids also started assembling their lapbook.

After that we listened to the podcasts about the trees we saw yesterday while the kids drew their favorite ornaments that they saw. Next we listened to the tape of the book The Legend of the Poinsettia. It was a great little book about Christmas in Mexico. And then we moved on to Japan and the kids worked on origami ornaments from ActivityTV.

Well... that's all we did worth writing about!