Trick or Treating

We don't eat candy in our house, but we're allowing Bear to go trick or treating with her cousin this year.  Last year, when she was two, it wasn't an issue.  Trick or treating doesn't happen in Costa Rica. There Halloween is something the grownups and young adults do as costume parties.

Bear knows she is going to be getting candy.  She also knows that she won't be allowed to eat it.  She'll be trading in her candy for other sweet treats we allow like Cascadian Farms Fruitful O's, a handful of dark chocolate chips, and a bit of icecream.

How do you tame the candy monster in your homes?

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Five Little Pumpkins

Who doesn't love the Five Little Pumpkin rhyme at Halloween time?

J-jo will sit endlessly as I chant it to him acting it out with miniature pumpkins, then he joins in the fun as we roll our pumpkins away.

We recently received books from Tiger Tales, 

wonderful tickle-your-senses-with-beautiful-illustrations-and-rhythmic-rhymes books,

and Five Little Pumpkins was one of them.

I love Ben Mantle's illustrations. I especially like how he did the "and out went the lights" page.

I also appreciated the fact that the book is a padded board book since J-jo is rough on books. 

If you're looking to add to your personal collection of Halloween books, this one is perfect for the babies and toddlers, and I know of at least one preschooler who still loves it and asks for it repeatedly!

Thank you to Tiger Tales for generously providing us with delightful books to read and review. 

Look for more of our reviews on upcoming  posts.

Linked to What My Child is Reading.

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Books for Australia

We're currently reading a lot of books about or set in Australia.  I thought I'd share the list and what I thought of each.

Diary of a Wombat - our favorite.  Very humorous look at a wombat's life with humans. It keeps information about wombats super simple, but even so, Bear could tell her Daddy that wombats sleep in the daytime, dig holes, live in the dirt, and eat grass after I read the story just once.

Wombat Stew - more of a fable.  We enjoyed it.  It shows lots of Australian animals.

Wombat Goes Walkabout - Another good one to show the different Australian animals.

The Biggest Frog in Australia - another fable involving Australian animals.  The biggest frog in Australia is so thirsty it drinks up all the water.  What are the thirsty animals supposed to do now?

 Snap! - The story of how a kangaroo joey doesn't want to nap and convinces all the other animals to play with him.  They each teach him a game, but the crocodile teaches him a game only a crocodile would want to play...a game of snap!

My Grandma Lived in Gooligulch - This is a great book for learning place names (as is the next book), but it you are not familiar with Australia, that can be a bit confusing.  This book is one long poem.  It reads well and has interesting illustrations full of things to look at and for.

Are We There Yet - This book gives a complete tour of the coast of Australia.  I enjoyed this book a lot, but unfortunately we kept getting interrupted during our reading of it so Bear couldn't appreciate it as much.  It's a bit lengthy too (as is the above book)

Where the Forest Meets the Sea - beautiful illustrations using mixed media collages to show the rainforest of Australia (I didn't even know Australia had rainforests).  Good book if doing an ecology theme.

To see what others are reading, visit  What My Child is Reading.

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Tot School

 J-jo is 14 months.

 Artistic Endeavors

 Dot markers to make a Fall tree. Very messy - he preferred to put the sponge part in his mouth.  Very short lived activity.

 I tried to get him to glue little orange squares inside a pumpkin shape I drew.  Not interested.  So sad.  He's SO different from Bear who was very interested in art from the get-go.

Fine Motor Skills

Puzzles. He can get them in some of the time.

 Transferring pompoms with the whole hand.

 Matching animals to the puzzle pieces. 

 Another transfer of pompoms.

Latches board.

Placing tees into playdough.

Unsuccessfully trying to hammer the tees.

Gross Motor Activity

 Walking, running, and playing in sand.

 Sliding and rolling balls down slide.  He goes up and down slide without help now.

Practical Life

 

 Blurry photo showing him after he had put his work away.

 Wiping table and sweeping.

Sweet Moments

 Reading

 Being fed and learning to feed self.

linked to 1+1+1=1

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Artists and Art Week 7 - Okajuma Toyohiro

A few weeks ago we were reading Grandfather's Journey for the Five in a Row part of our day.  It is a story of how a boy's grandfather traveled from Japan to the United States and then back and forth between the two for a bit until he returned for good to Japan.  As this story is set in Japan, I was delighted when I saw that Art in Action had a lesson on a Japanese artist named Okajuma Toyohiro.  He is a block print artist.  You can go to Wikipedia to read the details of how block printing is done, but basically, it is a wood block carved out with the picture. Then the block is inked and pressed onto the silk.  It is a long process as one must do all the different colors separately. 

The lesson:

We read the book .

We watched the video describing and analyzing Toyohiro's Four Accomplishments No.2.  The video is provided by Art in Action.  I love watching the videos they provide as they are so informative.  We learned all about the lines in the print and learned vocabulary such as vertical, horizontal, and diagonal, background, middle ground, and foreground.

We then used brushes and sponges to paint trees, using vertical, horizontal and diagonal lines.  They were to be four trees, one for each season, and you were meant to make a Japanese shoji screen with them, but we didn't bother.

Bear's Four Seasons, starting with Autumn.

To go with this unit we listened to Vivaldi's The Four Seasons.

If you've done any art with your child this week based on an artist or illustration style, or taught some of the elements and principles of art, or studied a musician or any other type of artist, please join the Linky.  Please remember to link back or grab the button on the side bar.

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Winner of CSN stores giveaway

Infant Bibliophile said...

I follow publicly :)

Congratulations! 

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Books of the Week

Bear's and Mommy's Favorite Read Alouds

The Rag Coat (a Five in a Row book) - definitely touches on sad and heavy topics (the father dies of lung disease from working on the coal mines) but the message about being forgiving (she has to forgive the kids who tease her about her coat) and the importance of being with people is a wonderful one.  There are so many teachable elements to this book.  However, it is not for all.  Although Bear does request it every night, I think the death part did affect her as she brings it up during the day that Minna's dad died from breathing coal dust.

How to Make an Apple Pie and See the World (a Five in a Row book)- I love how the book travels around the world, visiting places around the world for ingredients, such as Sri Lanka for cinnamon, England for a milk cow, Jamaica for sugarcane, Vermont for apples, somewhere I can't remember for a hen....

 The Diary of  a Wombat - This is a very cute book about life from the eyes of a wombat that trains the humans to give it carrots and oats.  I think wombats are my new favorite animal. 

Bear's Favorites for Reading Alone

Max Drives Away - we love every Max and Ruby book, but as Bear LOVES ice cream, this is favorite.

Brush, Brush, Brush - a cute little song to the tune of "Do Your Ears Hang Low?"

Cornelius P. Mudd, Are You Ready for Baby?-

J-jo's Favorites

He still loves My Pup, but has added Brush, Brush, Brush, and Busy Little Mouse to his favorites.

To see what others are reading, visit  What My Child is Reading.

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CSN stores giveaway!

 Have you seen all the wonderful things at CSN stores? I've been looking for an ottoman coffee table.  I could literally spend hours in there browsing. I love the ottoman coffee tables that double as storage. 

CSN stores is offering one of my readers a chance to win a $55 one time use gift code* to one of their 200+ stores.


Rules for entering:

1. You must publicly follow The Adventures of Bear and leave me a comment telling me that you do.  (But please don't follow just for the giveaway.)

I will be reviewing something from one of the CSN stores soon...I'm just having an incredibly hard time deciding.

2. If you go visit www.csnstores.com and come back with a suggestion as to what you think I should review, that will give you one extra entry.

3. If you have linked up to Artists and Art linky in the past three weeks and left a link back to me in your post, then you can gain an extra entry for each time you linked up (remember, it only counts if your post has a link back to my blog).  You must leave a comment for each extra entry.  That's a possible three extra entries.

4. Giveaway is open to US and Canada addresses only (and note that Canadians will have an extra international fee in addition to the shipping).

5* The gift code does not include shipping.

6. Giveaway closes Sunday, October 24th.

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Artists and Art Week 6 - Vincent van Gogh and Still Life

Before I talk about our Still Life project, I want to tell you a little but about Art in Action.  They offer art modules for different grade levels.  These art modules consist of lessons that present an artist, a painting by that artist and a student project based on something about the art of the focus artist.  They offer their program to homeschoolers as well.

I was given an art module to try out by Art in Action.  I am really impressed with how thorough the two lessons we have done have been.  If you do not feel comfortable teaching art appreciation, Art in Action is the perfect thing.  Each lesson has a video to watch that discusses the painting.  The painting is discussed by asking key questions that are then answered in the video.  The questions are meant to make the child think and provide something for them to tap into in the creation stage of the lesson. I have learned so many new things from watching these and I am not an art rookie.

They walk you through the lesson step by step and it is all shown to you in photos and videos.  I love all the curriculum integration ideas they suggest. There is an assessment section in which they provide questions for assessment.  For example, "Identify colors that were mixed to paint the flowers." or "Show where flowers and shapes overlap each other."  There are also ample additional resources suggested.  And even though I was given my module for free, this is my honest opinion of the module.  In fact, when Bear is older I will consider purchasing a few more modules.

I was thrilled that they had a Japanese artist in Art Module 1 as that tied in nicely last week with Grandfather's Journey.   This week I wanted a still life artist and was happy to find the Van Gogh lesson.  I did put my own twist to the project as we did not have sunflowers to paint.  Instead we painted our pumpkins.

We listened to the teaching video and read some books about van Gogh. Then I placed our pumpkins on the table and we talked about what shapes we saw.  We discussed how to mix paint to make orange and brown.  Then Bear and I painted.

 She got tired of doing the blue and asked me to finish it for her.  

Then she worked on a giant pumpkin whose stem broke off.

She wasn't going to add any stem, but I suggested she show a bit of the stump from where it broke off so that people who weren't as smart as she is could know it was a pumpkin. lol. Notice the TINY stem she made to humor me.

If you've done any art with your child this week based on an artist or illustration style, or taught some of the elements and principles of art, or studied a musician or any other type of artist, please join the Linky.  Please remember to link back or grab the button on the side bar.

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