Jesus Wants me for a.......

Sunbeam.

Yes! I get to be a Sunbeam teacher.  After 5 years of being in the Primary Presidency I decided to volunteer myself to teach the 3 year olds.  We have had trouble finding and keeping a teacher for this class for months.  So I figured my position would be easier to fill than the Sunbeam teacher assignment. Sure enough it was.   I like to think this calling will be less stressful and time consuming but I have a feeling it will be a whole lot of work and I will leave church each week feeling very tired.  I have been nursery leader, I know pretty much what I am in for.
Of course the potential energy of ten 3 year olds could really throw me for a loop. I guess we will have to see what comes of this new adventure.

Art Literature

We listened to Chasing Vermeer in the Fall. We really enjoyed it  and it got the kids very excited about Vermeer paintings. For some reason we didn't get the next books in the series until just recently.  Most likely we got busy reading other things and other school work.  But when I saw the audio books sitting there on the shelf at the library a few weeks ago and couldn't pass them up.

We started with The Wright 3.  This book took us on an adventure while learning a lot about Frank Lloyd Wright and especially the Robie house in Chicago.  We looked at lots of pictures of the house online so the kids could get a feel for what the story described. They have all decided we need to take a trip to Chicago so we can see this house. I am sure there are a lot of great things to see in Chicago so we will have to add it to the list of places to visit some day.
Since we couldn't go to the actual place I did find this video of the lego Robie house that really helped the kids see the layout of the whole building.


After watching this video they decided they really wanted to have this set of Legos but since the price tag says $179.00 I don't think it will be added to our Lego collection.

We quickly moved onto the third book in the series The Calder Game.


This book was about Alexander Calder and a sculpture called the Minotaur. I actually couldn't find a picture of this sculpture when I googled it so perhaps it isn't real or else just isn't photographed. But there were enough other pictures of Calder's other sculptures to give the kids an idea of what his work was like.
The kids were very excited to see this Alexander Calder fish mobile online because it is described in the story.

I personally had never heard of Alexander Calder before listening to this book. I have seen sculpture and mobiles much like the ones I see he made but I hadn't ever actually paid attention to who the artist was that created them.

I really liked these series of books. They helped me look at art in a different way. I hope the kids learned to see things in art they may not have thought before. If nothing else they have become acquainted with artists and styles of art they might not have otherwise. Well worth the time listening to this stories.

Language Arts for Today

Sophie had her online art class today. She turned in and discussed this assignment.

It was done with cut up scraps of paper. They had been discussing Matisse. But while she did that I needed to do something productive with the boys so I grabbed a book of the shelf. Sophie had already read it and did an oral book report on it so I knew she wouldn't mind missing it.

I spent an hour reading aloud to the boys the book Punished!. Ian wasn't supposed to do any reading this morning (He had had his eyes dialated yesterday afternoon and wasn't supposed to do any reading for 24 hours after and he wouldn't hear of disobeying the doctor's orders) so he couldn't do his math or writing.  Henry has no problem doing away with such things for a day so this was school for the morning.  It is a great little book just right for this 6-10 age range. It taught the boys some great language arts terms in a fun way.  I don't think they will forget what an oxymoron, an anagram or a palindrome is now. They also have all sorts of new puns to try to fit into conversation.

But you know it made an impression when they unprompted tell their Dad all about it when he gets home from work. That is the ultimate endorsement for a book!

Playdough Science

 Can you tell what this is? It is my model of the Heart I put together while learning about the Cardiovascular system last week. I mostly have green playdough so that is all the kids had to work with. Here are their hearts.

 Since my kids loved the play dough the week before I decided to get it out again today while we discussed the central nervous system and Neurons.  Each kid had clay and each of course wanted me to snap a picture of their creation. So bear with all the pictures.

 This is mine. Of course,  I can't let them have all the fun.

 We then moved onto neurons. These were even more fun to make. We started with the cell body and added the nucleus and added little indentations to represent the mitochondria or power houses of the cell. Can you see the dendrites the axon with the myelin sheath?

 This one is mine.

 Here is Sophie working on not just one but two neurons.

 Ian had to work fast because Molly was busy bashing his dendrites as she gathered more and more of his play dough onto her ball.

 Henry added a a brain and spinal cord to his.

I think these kids got the idea and can name the different parts of the neuron and some basics about the central nervous system. But more important that that is that they had fun doing it.

The Derby

Ian has only been a cub scout for a month and today he got to participate in his first Pine Wood Derby.

He designed his car and went to the wood shop with his den about two weeks ago. His Dad went with him too. He spent some time sanding and painting it until he decided it was done. They also got a kit from the wood shop to help you sand down the nails that act as the axles. You really can spend a lot building the perfect car that will fly down the course. Ian told me about all sorts of books and kits that they sell so you can get all the secrets to making the perfect winner.

I wanted to make sure it was Ian's project so I tried really hard to let him do what he wanted when they came back from cutting the body. He decided it was going to be green (his favorite color) and he added some brown and gold and sort of dabbed it all around to make it look rusty or old. He was going for scales because he wanted it to look like a snake. I think it sort of looks a bit more like a frog but, oh well.

We actually took it to the post office earlier in the week to see exactly how much it weighed and the post lady knew exactly what it was and happily placed it on the scale. We were just a little shy of the 5 oz that is allowed. So at the official weigh in they gave him one more washer to glue to the bottom and that brought him to about a hundredth of an ounce off the 5 ounce limit.

I never realized how serious cubs and their leaders take the Derby. He had his weigh in on Thursday and the car was placed in a little white styrofoam box where it had to stay and was kept under lock and key until race day.

Here is Molly waiting for the races to begin.

Each boys car raced three times against different cars each time. Ian's car seemed to do well. He won one by quite a bit and barely squeaked out a win on another and on the third came in 2nd to what ended up being the car that took the overall best time.  So despite having a tire pop off just before one of the races his car seemed to do great!

This is the practice track that the scouts used after their cars raced.

When the ranks were announced I was shocked to hear that Ian's car got first place in our ward's pack. His even did better than some of the boys' cars that take this race very serious and are out to WIN! His time was 6.837 seconds. The next fastest time was 6.863.  And what was even more amazing was that his car was ranked third overall. His car was the third fastest in our stake or I guess it is a Den, I don't know all the scout terminalogy. (I guess sanding down the nails worked!) So he could go to the district race. We decided to decline that honor.  We have heard some real horror stories about that event and decided this derby was enough for us.

So it was an exciting morning and our boy is very proud of his little green car!

Music and Art

Sophie's art assignment for the past week was to take some music and draw/paint what ever comes to mind while to listen.  So one night while the boys were off with their dad I put on a Chopin CD and gave Sophie a big piece of paper and she started to draw.

At first she didn't know what to draw but soon started thinking of different things. She listened to the entire CD and had a few small drawings scattered about her page.

Here is Pan playing his flute in a little forest.

an underwater castle,

And of course there was a cat.  Sophie explained that the cat was looking out the widow wishing to go out but it was raining.

After listening for a good long time I gave her a fresh page and got out the watercolors. She picked one of her images and painted it.

I am not surprised it was the one of the cat.

A little light bedtime reading

My kids have a really hard time calming down and going to bed. The bedtime ritual has to happen or else they just can't go to sleep. And the ritual is that their papa reads to them each night. At first I read a book to Sophie and the boys got their papa but Sophie always felt like she was missing out on something so would want to hear what book or story they were getting. Then when Molly came and I was off taking care of the baby my reading to Sophie stopped and she just joined the boys for a book and story from their papa.

And he spoils them. They get a good 30-45 min each night with him reading a book and then telling them stories. He makes them up on the spot and they often tell him what characters they want and he has to weave them all together. Often Harry Potter characters meet up with Tin Tin or Indiana Jones and have some adventure. Lately they have all been battling hydras or cyclopes or perhaps even a minotaur.

I usually pick out the book for the read aloud. My husband trusts my picks and lately I have picked some really great ones.

I gave him The Chocolate Touch which is a sort of King Midas story but set in the 50's and the boy turns everything chocolate. The kids loved telling me all about what turned chocolate each morning.

Then when that was finished I gave him Archimedes and the Door of Science . This time he would come and tell me about the book. He said this was not really a story book but sort of a biography but more about the gadgets and things Archimedes created. The kids loved it and so did he so it was a winner.

The current read aloud wasn't expressly chosen to be a read aloud. I actually checked it out of the library for me and my husband to read just because it is a topic he is interested in and it was recommended somewhere in the many blogs I read. It is an adult book and not from the children's section. The book is called How an Economy Grows and Why It Crashes.  He was reading aloud a section of the book to me while the kids were playing Legos one night and they enjoyed the storyline. It is told as a story. People live on an island and start trading fish which becomes their monetary system and the story continues as their economy grows and then begins to fall apart.

They are only half way through the book and my kids love it. I catch them reading it (all of them, Henry too, he likes the illustrations on many of the pages) during the day.  Tonight at dinner they kept telling me all about how the government on this island started to create fake fish and the fish kept getting smaller and smaller until you had to have lots and lots of fish to satisfy yourself when you used to only need one.  It is amazing how much economics they are picking up from this story.

The only thing with this whole read aloud set up is that I don't get to listen to the books. They are often books I haven't read either and when the kids tell me about them it makes me want to read them too.  I guess I just need to start sneaking a peek into these books so I know what they are talking about when they excitedly tell me the latest of what is happening in their night read aloud.