[ Posted by bibliomom
Sun, 11 Mar 2007 03:09:24 GMT ]
`417148713’ could not be displayed because:
Invalid API Key (Key has expired)
Well, spring’s a comin’ and tulips are popping up at grocery stores all over Seattle. Amazingly, we found a great book a the library that fits the spring theme and is perfect for early readers.
The Great Tulip Trade is a darling book about a little girl named Anna who receives tulips for her birthday. Of course since it’s set in 17th century Holland during the great tulip craze, amazing things begin to happen when passers by spy her beautiful flowers.
For a book about girls and flowers, it’s actually not that girly. The drawings are charming, not sappy, and little Anna shows remarkable common sense when it comes to trading her beloved tulips. The story’s well written and enjoyable, balancing the historical frenzy (and underlying greed) with Anna’s practicality and ultimate choice to save her last tulip for herself, no matter what she’s offered for it. There’s even a nice little author’s note at the end providing further information about this fascinating time.
I was really surprised at how much my son enjoyed this sweet little story. Tulips are his new favorite flower and we actually have a reason to brave the Skagit Valley Tulip Festival traffic this year. A fun little story that introduces a new moment in history with nary a pouty little princess in sight.
If only I could hope for as much from the Tulip Festival.
Posted in easy readers my son loves, books, cool kid stuff, educational & homeschool | no comments
[ Posted by bibliomom
Sat, 10 Mar 2007 17:20:09 GMT ]
Once again, Costco was full of fun stuff I just couldn’t resist. One such item was their big box o’ “Coloring Classics” - which is to say, 12 coloring books pulled from the Treasury of Illustrated Classics series - Pinocchio, Robin Hood, Alice in Wonderland, Journey to the Center of the Earth, Little Women, Beauty and the Beast, Black Beauty, Jungle Book (with Rikki Tikki Tavi), Peter Pan, Treasure Island, Wind in the Willows and the Wizard of Oz. Now, I don’t think my seven year old is going to give a flying flip about Little Women, but I know plenty of kids I could pass that one on to. And in the mean time, my boy is loving just sitting and reading these easy, illustrated editions of people running around with swords - I mean “classic adventure stories”.
In some ways, I think the market for these stories is a little weird – there’s only a couple of sentences per page, but the text requires a fairly proficient early reader or adult help. The stories have been super-simplified (like a Disney color book edition of a story) but it’s still enough to get the gist of the story. (And even as an adult, I can use the five-minute reminder of what each story is about.) The pictures are fairly simplistic as well, and usually far more cartoonish than the cover. Not bad, just basic, and probably really great for early elementary kids who are really visual and/or have short attention spans, as well as for slightly younger kids whose auditory comprehension skills are up to something more complex than “Maisy Drives the Bus”.
Best of all, it’s twelve coloring books for $11.49 with no t.v. characters, movie tie-ins, or bratty princesses in sight. Perfect for kids who love to color and parents who’d like to nudge their kids towards classic literature instead of the t.v.
Right up my alley.
Posted in books, cool kid stuff, educational & homeschool, compulsive research & product reviews, beginner read alouds for wiggly kids | no comments
[ Posted by bibliomom
Wed, 20 Dec 2006 07:03:43 GMT ]
Okay, you know I’m all about the wiggly kids – the ones who can’t play Candyland or Chutes and Ladders, or any other game involving card drawing, spinnners or endless turn taking. I can barely stand these games, so I don’t know why I think kids under 5 have any chance of making it through alive.
Having said that, we recently repurchased Cariboo for my 3 year old and I remembered 1) why we loved this game so much the first time and 2) why we needed to buy a new copy.
First, this is possibly the best game ever for bright, non-verbal, sensory-happy, and/or attention challenged young children. The game is basically a box with three holes at the top, a grid of 15 doors beneath that, and an empty tube (for balls) that leads to a treasure chest on the right. (Amazon has good pictures.)
You take turns drawing a card, matching the color/shape/number to a door on the grid, opening the door by poking a “key” into a little hole, and seeing if there’s one of six brightly colored bouncy balls is inside. If there’s a ball inside, you get to add it to the tube on the right; if not, the turn moves to the next person. After all six balls are put in the tube the treasure chest pops open, everyone says, “Yay! We won!” and you start over.
Basically, it’s opening little boxes (with a key no less) and looking for pretty balls. What could possibly be more fun? Unless you’ve deeply offended the luck fairy, everyone will find at least one ball and as long as you emphasize, “That’s okay - try again next time!” it’s a great chance to work on turn taking (especially since the key moves with the turn). It’s also really fun to have a game where everyone legitimately gets to share an obvious win.
My oldest loved this game, eventually loving it to death, popping off all the doors and losing the balls.
The new one seems even better – the doors come with reversible cards for more advanced matching – but it’s still just as popular. It took my daughter about three minutes to master it and only about five to get her to echo back, “That’s okay - try again!” when she failed to find a ball. Considering her speech and social delays, I was thrilled – matching she can do, but dealing with disapointment and taking turns can be a challenge.
Anyway, what with Christmas looming I thought I should through out my suggestion for an oldie but a goodie.
Cariboo gets a 2 chair rating in my household – as in, ‘my daughter dragged two ridiculously heavy chairs into the library in an attempt to liberate her beloved game from the top shelf’.
And if that doesn’t convince you, then nothing will.
Posted in cool kid stuff, educational & homeschool, compulsive research & product reviews | 1 comment
[ Posted by bibliomom
Fri, 21 Jul 2006 16:57:47 GMT ]
While my son has worked his way past the excellent beginner BOB books, he’s by no means a flawless and accomplished reader – and that’s okay. He’s only six, after all. But it does mean that we’re always on the lookout for beginner readers that he 1) is capable of reading with minimal guidance and 2) is interested enough in to sit and just look through on his own. The Step into Reading edition of David and the Giant is both.
One of their Level 2 readers, it has a little more text and a lot more plot that he’s been reading, but they do a good job of keeping the narrative clean and the wording simple. In short, it’s a charming, easy to read edition of a familiar story. It lists for $3.99, but since WalMart (which I normally think is t3h 3vil) has a good selection of early readers for $2.50, it might be worth a special trip.
(Oh, and for those who are wondering, it manages to stay fairly true to the original story without being overly gory, preachy, or smarmy – an accomplishment in and of itself.)
Posted in books, cool kid stuff, educational & homeschool | 1 comment
[ Posted by bibliomom
Thu, 25 May 2006 20:33:00 GMT ]
board books are good
Picture, if you will, the idyllic scene of an adorable pig-tailed preschooler, perched on Mama’s knee, book in hand and rapt with attention. Now picture the same child (but much dirtier) crawling around my lap and up and over my head before yanking the book out of my hand in order to rapidly flip through the pages herself.
Now guess which scene is the norm at my house.
It’s not that she doesn’t love books – she loves to look through brightly illustrated picture books, preferably featuring her favorite tv characters. But as much as she loves looking at Dora, she just doesn’t have the patience to sit through the direct-from-tv-scripted text.
Hola! It’s Valentine’s day! Boots and I just finished making a valentine’s card for my grandma! Mi abuela! We’ve also got a special Valentine’s Day surprise for her.
WIll you help us bring the surprise to Grandma’s house?
Great!
This is all on the opening page. Needless to say, by the time we get to the special surprise, Sophie’s grabbed the book and flipped the page herself.
Which is why we love the Maisy books. Instead of me having to make up my own story in order to keep pace with her manic page flipping (“Look! There’s Dora and Boots! Hi, Dora! Hi, Boots” insert page turn noise here), most of the Maisy books are just flat out geared for small kids with no attention span.
Take Maisy’s Train. For starters, it’s a board book – perfect for violent page turners. Second, it’s illustrated in bright, primary colors, with simple illustrations. Third, it’s only about 16 pages long. Last, and more importantly, the text consists of simple descriptions of what’s going on in the pictures and only takes 5 or 6 seconds to read – about the length of time it takes to look the picture over and turn the page.
Maisy is driving her train today. All aboard. Toot-toot.
insert page turn noise here
We’re off to the country. Hello, Geese!
It’s that basic. And yet at their best, the Maisy books are also utterly charming and entertaining. Reading Maisy’s Fire Engine makes that same wiggly girl fall off my lap giggling with delight instead of impatience.
Now, there’s a whole herd of Maisy books and videos (the videos are largely the book and text set to calm, entetaining music – we’re rather fond of those, too). There’s board books, paper books, flap books, slide/pull tab books, and a book that turns into a paper doll house. My daughter has matured a little and is now willing to sit through just about anything Maisy, but some of the stories are a little snappier than others, and different sets tend to follow different themes. For instance, Where Are Maisy’s Friends? and Where is Maisy’s Panda are two of our favorite Lift-the-Flap books where Maisy’s searching for something (“Who’s that hiding under the bed?”) – really basic and especially fun for hands-on kids. Maisy Drives the Bus and Maisy’s Pool are inexpensive paper picture books that have a bit more of a story and which my daugter adores. Maisy’s Big Flap Book is more of an activity book than a story (“Maisy and Tallulah work in the garden. Look how many flowers they have grown! Can you count the flower and bugs in each row?” proceed to flip up 15 flower flaps) but what’s not to love about an oversized board book with flaps? Some of the pull-tab books I’ve seen are also lots of fun, but much more fragile.
Gotta kid who won’t sit still for storytime? Try Maisy – the illustrations are always charming, the text is always simple, and with flaps, pulls and dozens of titles to choose from, there’s bound to be something your little wiggler will enjoy.
Posted in books, cool kid stuff, educational & homeschool, beginner picture books for wiggly kids | Tags books, Maisy | 2 comments
[ Posted by bibliomom
Thu, 25 May 2006 19:22:00 GMT ]
So, despite my moniker, I haven’t been blogging much in the way of books. Don’t get me wrong – I love books. My kids love books, my spouse loves books – if we ever manage to get a cat, it’ll probably read, too.
I just couldn’t figure out what I wanted to do.
Amazon is rife with “so, you want to read a good mystery/kid’s book/slime monster story” categories, so I wasn’t really sure I wanted to do that. That being said, I finally decided that since I tend to be so passionate about books that I love, that I’d recommend those. I’m going to try and categorize them in some kind of useful way and not worry about whether they’re new, old, popular or educational or even dreadful overexposed.
Since both my kids are very visual learners (and very wiggly), I’ve decided to start with “beginner picture books for wiggly kids” and “beginner read alouds for wiggly kids”. For my purposes, picture books are geared for the “hurry up and turn the darn page!” crowd – usually toddlers and preschoolers – and the read alouds are picture intensive books that still tell an actual story that a more visual learner (in our case, a kid with audio processing delays) can keep track of and enjoy. If your child can sit quietly and listen to Beezus and Ramona or Peter Pan and be able to tell you what’s going on, then they’re beyond these books. They’d probably still enjoy them, but they’d be capable of more. My son isn’t – as much as he loves books, he’s only capable of processing and keeping track of so much information per page. Which is to say, while he does fairly well with the beginner Five in a Row books, but is totally unprepared for the Sonlight Core 1 Readers that we just bought.
So for Gabe, we’re focusing on getting better retention and more content out of the read alouds he’s capable of listening to – and I’m going to try reviewing/making a functional list of them as we go.
And for Sophia, I’m going to try to start keeping track of the books that she loves and is wiling to listen to.
Most of all, I’m trying to find and catalogue good books that my kids love. And if you happen to be one of those parents with wiggly kids, or visual kids, or kids with some other developmental impairment, maybe they’ll love them, too.
Posted in cool kid stuff, educational & homeschool | Tags "Five, "visual, a, books, in, kids, learner", Row", Sonlight, wiggly | no comments
[ Posted by bibliomom
Thu, 27 Apr 2006 03:43:00 GMT ]
Rosetta Stone
You’ve probably seen those nifty adds: “Learn a foreign language in just ten easy steps, fifteen minutes a day, while driving in your car, asleep.” And it’s always just so tempting. Dreams of sipping champagne by le Tour Eiffel, snappily summoning the garcon in flawless French; lounging around Tuscany, munching on mozarella and being able say “mo-tza-reLLa” without sounding like an idiot.
Putting aside that even my travel fantasies seem to revolve around food, learning another language makes it seem like you might actually go somewhere one of these days.
This is not to say that I’ve spent any time actually working on a foreign language since I ruined my high school French by too many summer trips to Mexico. (Parle vous frijoles?) But given my latest, best homeschooling mom tip, this might just change.
I’ve been lusting after the Rosetta Stone foreign language software since I first saw it advertised: immersion learning through images, text and sound with no drills or rote memorization. Woot!
Only two things stood in my way: picking a language and the price. (Lo! A topic approaches!) Japanese seemed like the best compromise, since Scott took it high school and we watch about as much tv in Japanese as in English. But since the Rosetta Stone Japanese edition is, oh $300, it seemd a little pricey for a homeschool class for a five year old.
(Yes, yes, I’m getting to the cheap part. Keep your pants on.)
Then my homeschool connections (impressive, huh?) tipped me off to the King County Library system database. Yes; if you go to the main page and look at the top, there it is on a big yellow button to the right of “Library Catalog” – “Databases”. All the books I’ve reserved online and I never even noticed it. Click that, then under the alphabet letters on the next page, click “R” for Rosetta.
And there it is, between Resume Builder and Sammamish Valley News. Dutch, English, Farsi and Portuese – I think there’s 29 in all. Basically, King County has already paid enrollment for an online foreign language class; all you have to provide is a library card, a web browser, and a decent internet connection. Log in, sign up, and then just mosey along at whatever pace your heart desires.
Ah, the wonders of technology.
Now, my title is misleading: this particular deal only works if you live around Seattle and don’t need to mortgage your car to pay off your library fines.
It may not be a trip to Tokyo, but as Grandma K always says, it sure beats a sharp poke in the eye.
Posted in educational & homeschool, compulsive research & product reviews | Tags education, foreign, homeschool, language, Rosetta, Stone | no comments
[ Posted by bibliomom
Tue, 08 Nov 2005 20:51:00 GMT ]
So we finally went to see The Magic School Bus Kicks Up A Storm exhibit at the Seattle Children’s Museum this last week. Aside from the fact that no bus could possibly be as cool as the Cat Bus from the Japanimation exhibit a few years back, it was okay.
Broadcast the weather. As a T-Rex.
That was the problem, imho. It was just “okay”. To clarify, it’s all about weather. Sure, it had a ‘be a weather person’ broadcast set and a ‘mix your own weather’ at the helm of the Magic School Bus, but on the whole the exhibit seemed a bit disjointed and confusing. The ‘weather person’ broadcast set had a t.v. where kids could watch their ‘broadcast’ – unfortunately it was perched behind them on the back of the set wall.
Mix water, wind, and heat to make weather.
And while it was fun to ‘mix up a tornado’, the necessary reading skills and the lack of complete directions meant my five year old just kept turning knobs and pressing buttons whileI tried to figure it out – and I pretty much assume that anything that takes me 2 -3 minutes to figure out is going to utterly stump most of the under 7 crowd. (btw - push the flashing button.)
And who else do they think is coming to the Children’s Museum? Granted, I’m sure school groups are coming en masse, and doubtless there are kids over 7 among them, but the fact remains that as neat as the Magic School Bus looked, I kept looking around for the teacher’s manual that explained how some of the exhibits worked. (And there were a few that obviously didn’t.) Other than button pressing, there’s a limited amount of unguided activity for younger kids. (Though we did get to see Liz.)
Something for the kiddies.
Prep work: before you go, read (or re-read)
The Magic School Bus Kicks up a Storm and
The Magic School Bus Inside a Hurricane, as quite of bit of the exhibit (and small experiments) seem to be based on these – hence the name. Then bring one or both to use as a crib sheet for what I assume is a ‘make your own clouds’ station – unexplained cotton balls and glue sticks some distance from the ‘types of clouds’ exhibit. Unless you really want to admit to your kindergardener that you can’t remember the difference between cirrus clouds and cirra … curricu … colmbo … – you know, those other ones. The books might also be handy in figuring out how to work some of the experiments.
Now you and your Magic School Bus and/or science fan are ready to go – you’ll probably even enjoy it. Just try not to swear too loudly when some screaming four year old in an oversize raincoat starts pushing your buttons while you’re trying to figure out how to mix up a hurricane.
I’ll rate it a:
B - for Magic School Bus fans & young scientists
C - for everyone else and most of the under 7 crowd
Exhibit runs through November 27, 2005.
Posted in cool kid stuff, educational & homeschool | no comments
