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".

Preschool ramblings.

When Sophie was 4 I started doing Five in a Row with her. I was pretty good about doing a new book each week and we even did lapbooks for many of them. Ian is now 4 years old and I keep thinking I need to give him more. I have had a hard enough time keeping up with History, Science, Music, Art, Math and so forth with Sophie that it is hard to fit in FIAR too. Plus I run out of hold requests each week as it is. (The library only lets me put 10 books on hold at a time. So either I have to go to the library more then once a week or I need to get a few more library cards.) When I was really good about doing FIAR I would plan at least 2 weeks ahead and get a bunch of books from the library as go alongs. I just can't seem to do it along with trying to stay 2 weeks ahead with history and Science as well.
One of Ian's Lego creations
Ian does sit in on most of the reading I am doing with Sophie. He sits and plays legos or knights while we read aloud or listen to stories on CD. I know he is learning but it isn't stuff that is just for him. He is starting to show more interest in doing school. Which is why I am thinking more about this. Yesterday he sat down with us at the table and grabbed his PreK workbook and worked on some of the pages in it. I was helping Sophie work through some math problems. Ian decided to do a page of cutting. So I got him a pair of scissors and tore the page out of the book for him. He sat there working on his cutting for a while.
He did a great job cutting and then I gave him a glue stick so he could put the pieces together. When he was finished he proceeded to do another page where they had him color in shapes. After doing this one he said he was finished and left the table to go back to his knights which he had scattered about on the floor. He doesn't show a lot of desire to learn to read yet but he does love to do a little school like this once in awhile.
I really shouldn't worry about trying to fit FIAR in too much. (I still want to do it though, and will try to fit it in once in awhile. I know the kids have loved it when we have.) I know Ian is learning new things everyday as he listens to lots of books and stories. He goes on nature walks with us and is learning to look closely at nature. I guess the younger kids learn a lot just from following along with what the older kids are doing.
It is so mind boggling to me to think that kids Henry's age are going to be starting Preschool in the Fall. We have friends that are signing there 3 or almost 3 year olds up for programs that will start in August. That just seems so strange to me. Henry going to school? He too loves to read books and participate in things but I really don't see him doing anything formal for a long, long time. I am sure it will be sooner than I think.

Row, Row, Row a Book

I picked The Pumpkin Runner to row this week. I don't know exactly why I picked it. I don't even have the volume 4 manuel. But I have rowed enough books to know what to look for and point out and kinda make it up myself. It isn't the first time I have done this. But I have extra help this week.
Sophie has decided that FIAR is for the boys and that she is too old for it. So I asked her if she would help me teach the lessons to the boys (I have to play a lot of tricks with this girl to keep her interested and learning). I asked her what she thought we should do. She said she would teach Ian all about Australian animals: koala, kangaroos, wombats and cockatoos. I asked her if she could think of any books we have about those animals. She remembered Ian loved Katy No Pocket. She decided we needed to listen to some Wiggles music and maybe watch Finding Nemo.
We also plan to cook one of our pumpkins and make pumpkin cookies or something. Sophie is going to find our Pumpkin Pumpkin book tomorrow and read it to Ian.
Today I took the kids to a park that I knew had Eucalyptus trees so we went to look at them. Not that we haven't seen them many times before. These trees are all over the place here and my kids love the little seed cups from these trees. It was just a good excuse to take our scooters to the park and go on a long walk.

We also couldn't pass the up the chance to throw rocks in the creek and look at the ducks and geese there too.

Hopefully Sophie and I can come up with an art and Language arts lesson to go along with all the plans we already have for the week. YUP! It isn't all planned out... we are winging it this week!

Our Week

Here is a quick run down of what we were able to accomplish this week.

We rowed Daniel's Duck this week. The kids enjoyed learning about Tennessee, the seasons and log cabin life. They loved the activity where we carved soap.
This was Ian's soap fish. He was so careful with the carving. He was also willing to get a little help. Henry destroyed his bar of soap but had a great time doing it. Sophie had a melt down when hers didn't go as easily as she wanted, and refused to let me help her, so she had to cool off in her room. Henry ended up stealing her bar of soap and breaking it into small pieces so Ian's carving is the only one that survived. We tried another bar of soap with Sophie but it wasn't the soft Ivory Soap so it was too hard to carve. Maybe the next time I remember to buy some Ivory soap we will give it another go.

I started Story of the World with Sophie this week. I broke down and bought the CD's and Activity book which I am very glad I did. We usually listen to the section on the CD and then read other library books that go along with the topic. This week just went through the introduction. We discussed "What is History?" and "Archeology". Sophie at first balked at the idea of adding more school into our day. (This is a usual reaction which is why I add things to the schedule one thing at a time) We did History 3 times this week and by the 3rd time she didn't resist me so this is a good start. She really enjoyed the lessons once we got started each day. Plus it helped to tell her we were going to read a Magic School Bus book as part of the lesson.

To go along with our studies we created a wall timeline that we will continue to add to as we go.
I hope the picture is somewhat clear. We put the timeline down the narrow hall. It was hard to take a picture of the whole thing. We just strung string between two thumb tacks. One string/row for each time period. We added a few events to the timeline to give Sophie and idea of what we would be doing. These are just index cards with a picture and Sophie wrote a short description on them.

We also made a short timeline just to show Sophie's history. And I printed out a few photos to go along with it. She loved the day we did this because we looked through our scrapbooks and talked about when Sophie hit each milestone.


This has been what we have done for formal schooling this week. We always have a bunch of other things that we learn and study about. We have read extensively about birds and we are also reading a lot of alphabet books with Ian working on letter recognition. Sophie learned how to sew up a little rip in one of her stuffed animals. Henry just sits through everything and loves to feel like he is a part of everything.

All the kids are learning some sign language. We get new Signing Time DVDs at the library each week and usually end up watching one every day. Henry is communicating so much better now. It is always so cute to see him make the signs for things.

Once we get settled into doing history maybe I will start Math or First Language Lessons. But for now this is enough for us for now.