Books

So, I'm wanting to keep track of some of the super wonderful books we have been reading lately. There have been way to many to list, but here are a few, and I'll be adding more as we find particularly good ones:

We just finished the original Pinnochio book. Boy, is that one strange book! Okay, I don't know that I'd recommend it, it is well written, but I'm not sure what the guy was smoking when he wrote it. Truly one of the strangest stories I've ever read. Highly creepy! Nick loved it though, so we did read the whole thing.

Before that we read several of the Dr. Doolittle books. These were great fun for the whole family. The first book had beautiful pictures which was a double bonus, but the second and third just had simple line drawings. These are definitely a family favorite. I've read the original one a couple of times. These are really good for a read aloud, because there are a few areas where the terms they use for people are less than PC, so reading it aloud allows for some mild term editing.

At the beginning of the year, we read the original Winnie the Pooh series. Another fun set. I'd actually never read them and they were fantastic. Nick especially loved them.

During the day this week, we've been reading "Adventures in the Big Thicket" by Ken Gire, which is a delightful series of stories, all with a moral lesson. Lots of fun and quite enjoyable.

That reminds me, we recently read a collection of stories called "The Children's Book of Virtues" wow, that is an incredible selection of poems and stories. We loved it! There are a few more in the series, but this one was aimed at young kids Nick's age and a bit older / younger.

So, back to this week, a few more books we read:
Bentley and Egg - I love this one, we've read it a couple of times. It's about a frog whose best friend is a duck. The duck lays an egg... frog gets jealous of the egg, but in the end the frog ends up saving the egg from a young boy. A great story, and would be fantastic for sibling jealousy as it deals with similar emotions.

Zoom at Sea - This was a good story, but a bit weird. Nick loved it, so perhaps it just required more imagination than I had this morning. The story is about a cat who goes sailing on the ocean, which is in someone's living room... at least that's what it sounded like. Still, a very well written book. If you figure out what the deal with the ocean is, I'd love to hear!

Flat Stanley - We read this in preparation for our Flat Stanley project. A decent, easily read book. Definitely a "quick" read. Not the best written book, but it's rather amusing to think of what it would be like to be flat.

Harald and the Great Stag - we read this one tonight for family story time (every night we have a story that we all share right before bed). It's a great story with wonderful illustrations. In the story Harald risks getting into a lot of trouble by saving a Stag that is being hunted, and in the process gets to see what it feels like to be hunted. Probably not a story you want to read if you want your kids to be hunters. Harald (yes, this is really how he spells it) is a loving, courageous, intelligent young boy.

Father's Day

Father's Day was last Sunday, and we had a good day. We tried to make it a fun day for Erik. Nick wanted me to show everyone the cookie cake we got at Sam's Club for Erik:


I tried to give Erik a video game (I hadn't gotten it yet because it hasn't been released yet), but he has decided he'd rather go out just the two of us, so we're going to do that (which I'd rather do anyways :) ). Nick insisted that he needed to buy his daddy a box of chocolates, but we couldn't find one he liked so he ended up giving him two bags of truffles, yummm.

Flat People

We've decided to do flat people for homeschool this year, and we'll be keeping track of their travels on our blog here. So, what is a flat person? I'm glad you asked :) Flat people are paper people that go travelling and stay as guests in other people's homes. Ideally people in other parts of the state, other states, and even other countries. The hosts take the people with them when they go places, take pictures with the flat people, and write a little journal for the flat person (or an e-mail home, which is what we're hoping for). When they are done they send it on to someone else or return the flat person to it's home. This is a great way to expose kids to geography and make distant places a little more real. So, we've got our flat people decorated, I'll post pictures of them soon, we've got some ummmm interesting "people", including some real aliens! If anyone is interested in hosting one for us, please let me know!

Here's Nick working on one of the flat people he decorated:

Take A Kid Fishing Day

A week or so ago, we had the opportunity to participate in Idaho's annual "Take A Kid Fishing Day". There were local events, but we decided to make a day out of it and drive out to Island Park for the day. It was windy and a little chilly, but absolutely beautiful. Nick has always wanted to go fishing and we had not yet taken him out so this was a great opportunity. We didn't catch anything, but we all had a lot of fun.

Just Nick and Daddy:


If you take a close look you can see how crowded this little pond was, it was crazy, I'm sure that didn't help with catching anything.




Pondering life? Maybe or maybe just pondering how serious mommy and daddy were when they said not to throw any more rocks in the pond :)


Later we stopped for a picnic lunch and watched the wildlife at the Harriman State Park Wildlife Reserve, and then we went for a drive up by the Mesa Falls, where we hope to go camping sometime this year.

Science Experiments

Grandma sent Nick a super fun Energy Science Kit a couple of weeks ago. She sent some other things too, but this was really what caught his attention. He was so excited, we had to do this one right away. The idea is to light the LED using a variety of liquids and some metal plates. We tried a few different liquids. Water didn't light it up at all, water with vinegar lit it up pretty good, as did salt water. Surprisingly lemon water didn't light it up very well at all, just slightly better than plain water. In retrospect I should have tied this to our energy science lessons that we had before, but I didn't even think about it at the time... maybe next time :)

Here's Nick checking out the light to try to gauge how bright it is.



Tada:

A Trip to the Circus

At the beginning of June we took Nick to the circus. It was a great night and we all had a ton of fun. I tried very hard to capture his excitement on camera, but it just wasn't possible to get the full level of his excitement. At times he was actually jumping up and down and pointing, it was great. Five is definitely the ideal age for the circus.

Have some cotton candy?



Are you sure?


A little glimpse of the wonder:



We really wanted to get Nick a souvenier, this was what he chose. This light up sword ended up being the hit of the night, and we're trying to figure out if daddy can make a "real" lightsaber thatlights up on both ends like this.



This face says it all:



Isn't this cool?


A wonderful night full of wonderful memories!

A Farewell To Boxie

Nick said goodbye to a faithful old friend today.

Several months ago, Erik got a sand blaster which came in a very large cardboard box. Nick has played with that box for months (literally). It has been a house, a restaurant, even a turtle shell! You name it, he's done it with that box. The box has finally had it, so he said goodbye, and then wrote goodbye on the box (so that boxie wouldn't forget he loved him). So here is a final salute of farewell to Boxie: