Sunday, October 11, 2009

Roxaboxen

We spent a few days at Grandma's house this weekend. It is apple picking time so the adults spent a lot of time pealing, cutting and canning apples. The kids spent a lot of their time out side. The weather was perfect so I often sent them out to enjoy it rather than sit in front of the computer, which they do a lot while at Grandma's house.

At one point, early on in our visit, I realized I hadn't seen Sophie for a few hours. She had been outside for a really long time. The boys had come in and gone out several times but Sophie hadn't made an appearance. So I walked out onto the porch and looked around to see if I could see her.

I walked toward Grandpa's garden and orchard because I knew that was one of the kids favorite places to play. And sure enough, there was Sophie, in the orchard, very intent on what she was doing.

So I walked around to the gate and went inside. Sophie didn't even realize I had come out until I started to ask her about what she was doing. She quickly started telling me all about her project.



She welcomed me to "Roxaboxen" and showed me around. Roxaboxen is a book that we rowed a few years ago when we were going through the Five in a Row curriculum. It is still one of my kids favorite books to have read to them. I often find Sophie reading it to herself. But this is the first time she actually made her own little town of Roxaboxen. In the book the children made a little village or town, with houses, streets, and other buildings all outlined in rocks. The kids then played all sorts of games in this little town of Roxaboxen.

Sophie showed me her house, the general store (complete with some of Grandpa's tomatoes to sell), the church, Ian's house and the jail (Ian is the policeman). Each house or building was built around one of the fruit trees.
We came out to the orchard several times during our visit in order to see the progress the kids were making on their little town. Every time we pulled them away from this project for a bit, they would quickly ask to go out again and work on their village.

After two days of hard work the little town was looking good. The streets were outlined starting from the gate and each tree was nicely decorated to look like whatever purpose it was designated for.




I always love to see what my kids come up with when they have nothing to do. The cousins they usually play with were busy during the few days we were up there and I tried to make sure we kept the movie and computer time to a minimum during our stay. Especially since one of the days we were up there was a school day.



Roxaboxen was almost all Sophie. It was her plan and she carried out most of the construction but the boys sure had a good time playing out there and helping her dreamed up little world come to life. I love to see their imaginations take over.



As we were loading up the car to head back home Ian made the comment "We didn't get to see our cousins even once while we've been here. But we had fun anyway".

2 comments:

Bibliophile said...

The children were really creative with their little town. I heard the name they gave it but I didn't understand what it was. I took a few photos of the town, too, because I was impressed with their work. They were intent upon making it authentic, and were proud to show it off.

Anonymous said...

I love seeing what kids do when they have nothing to do. We haven't rowed Roxaboxen. I'll have to add it to my list since we're actually doing FIAR this year.