Art and Craft Supplies

I've recently been asked a bunch for my list of craft supplies I keep on hand so I thought I'd re-share it here at Blog, She Wrote as well. The link above will take you to a post from earlier this year.



I was also perusing The Crafty Crow this evening and I found this list. I was just thinking that I should update my list with materials I keep on hand now that my kids are older. A lot of them are the same, but I do have some items now that I didn't have when I only had preschoolers.

Not to worry! We have nearly all of what is on the list at the Crafty Crow. Thank goodness! Happy projecting to all of you!

J3's Crazy Bubble Scare

A couple of days ago we had to run an errand to Walmart so I could pick up some folders for some MOPS Coordinator's training packets. J3 is the only one of my kids who's ever latched onto something he wants to take home when we go to a store. This day it was a bubble gun. Naturally I declined, but I did put the large container of bubble solution into the cart. Typically we make our own solution, but we hadn't yet this season so I thought, "Why not?"

The next day he spent hours in the afternoon with his sister and brothers blowing bubbles. Ever seen a just-turned-3yo blow bubbles? I kept trying to teach him technique and encourage him to keep the bubble wand OFF of his face. To no avail. Eventually they all get the hang of it and in the meantime his face was a bit soapy and none of us witnessed any drinking. Honest. and I'm pretty sure we would have noticed. When I brought him in I rinsed his face well and that was that.

All that evening he complained about his mouth and he kept running to the bathroom to look at it. Not once did he say, "My mouth hurts!" That night he complained when we brushed his teeth and wiped his face from dinner. I noticed his lips were pretty red and thought that perhaps the extended time in the water chapped them. I put some Vaseline on to relieve the discomfort.

Friday morning he looked the same. He still complained about his lips and I reapplied the Vaseline.

Finally, it was time to leave for the picnic. Dan's lab has a huge picnic annually for the staff and users of the facility. The plan was to drive to the lab, pick up Dan, and head to the park. When I got there Dan was snagged by someone and he needed to talk to this guy for 10 minutes. I took the kids in to wait. That is when I noticed it.

The whitish blue crazy creepy flaps of skin hanging off of J3's mouth. White. With a tinge of blue. HANGING over his teeth. I quickly made an assessment. First reaction. WHAT IS THAT? Second reaction. Gross! I decided water would help. By this time J3 would not swallow and looked quite miserable.

I phoned Dan again and we met up in the atrium of his building where I showed him this crazy creepy skin thing going on in J3's mouth. I said, "Does this look like a trip to urgent care to you?" Yes, was the emphatic reply.

So, instead of heading to fun and frolic. We went to urgent care and I sat down with the check in lady spewing out allergic reaction...bubbles...yuck....

When all was said and done, his vitals were fine and his breathing was good. He just has this awful chemical burn in his mouth and the crazy creepy flaps of skin which, in case you are still wondering, were the surfaces of the inside of this sweet boy's mouth and tongue. He lost the top (and probably several more) layers of those sensitive epithelial cells lining the inside of his mouth and the top of his tongue. The whole thing. The back of his throat was fine- so no swallowing. We didn't think so.

We've been treating him with a mixture of liquid Benadryl and Mylanta. Today it looks much better and he will swallow now too. But he's still losing the crazy creepy flaps of skin.

This is much later in the day when it was looking way better. His top lip was really awful. The whitish layer you see is skin that has died and will slough off. The redder part is the raw, newly exposed layer. Imagine it being like that on top only it was hanging down over his teeth! And trust me this photo does not do the carnage justice. AAAhhhhh!

Dead, white skin on the back of his tongue and the front is the red and newly exposed layer. It came off in chunks all over his mouth.

So, now what to do? I'd like to know what's in those bubbles- the harmless big bottle of little kid fun. I don't know if it was an allergic reaction or an oversensitivity to harsh chemicals and long exposure. I do know the doctors and nurses at the urgent care had never seen anything like it. I hadn't either. J3- constantly taking us to new levels of parenting.

Of course I've also thought of generating one of those "pass this to all your friends" emails. Instead of my 3yo's face being burned by Magic Eraser, it'll be my 3yo's mouth was caustically burned by Walmart Bubble Solution in the large bottle. I wonder if it's made in China. I wonder if Snope's would have an answer as to whether or not it's a hoax.

Kandinsky in Process

Remember that acrylic on canvas R8 began on her birthday...way back on June 1st? Tonight I gave her the opportunity to make some progress on her painting. She gets to be up a bit later and we get to have some time to work just the two of us. We both appreciate that chance!

The art apron- I decorated this apron for her a few years ago. That's all free hand down there folks- not bad even if I do say so myself! Above "artist in residence" is her name.

Her palette- she helped to choose them up. There's a few colors not quite in the same family as most but that's ok. Isn't it?

Her brush strokes are getting more confident!

She has really enjoyed working on the canvas. Before the night was through, she finished this one and one more for a total of three squares this evening. Our artist was tired by the end! She was chatting about entering this into the upcoming 4-H fair.

We can hardly wait for the finished product which we will hang on her bedroom wall. I don't know what Kandinsky would have to say about her work, but she digs his style!

Rainy Day Play!

We are having a good ol' fashioned rainy day here today. Dan has the van and I am free most responsibilities at last! All of our homeschool reports are in and accepted including next year's letters of intent. That was two quarterlies, one narrative year end assessment, one explanation that E9's IOWA scores are due back in July so I will send them along at that time, and three letters of intent for next school year!

On top of that was a MOPS Coordinator's gathering here last night which meant lots of preparation of training packets and information for the ladies.

On Monday we spent the day at an amusement park...more on that to come. So, if you've missing entries since Sunday that's what's been going on!

After J3 finished playing Playdoh and opening and trying out a large container of bubbles (disaster averted there), he settled down with my binding combs on the "office" floor made up of carpet sraps.

This is a giant frontier fort built by the kids- for Native Americans, some frontiers and what appears to be large piles of Lego guys.

E9 made a nice farmyard complete with paper to simulate grass and water in the corrals. But...what's up with the X Wing?

AAAhhhhhh....it's nice to have a relaxing day. Somehow though, the MOPS reports and the year long homeschool plans for three children loom in the distance. I have four weeks to plan 180 days for 3 kids (well the big picture plan anyway). I guess I won't relax too long!

What Do I Wear?

This a daily hue and cry from R8. That's right. I said 8. It is often followed by, "I have nothing to wear," and a young girl sitting and staring at her closet. She's only 8. Did I mention that?

Her closet had become so packed full of clothes- I'm not sure when that happened, but surely did. Too many clothes make it difficult for children to manage their space. So, we hoed out. We placed her out of season clothes up on top (it's high up so they are somewhat mashed...) and set aside things she's outgrown- which I do often so there weren't that many items.


Then I set to thinking about how to solve the "what to wear" problem. She has trouble picking out things that match and we just don't have the space for those cute little closet or door hanger organizers with the days of the week on them. You know the ones- you get to put the clothes in there ahead of time and there's no fuss (well as long as you are not I-6 who is very particular about his clothing choices).

Well it came to me. Why not take pictures of matching outfits, print them, and hang them up on the closet door or the back of her bedroom door. Or I could make a notebook or a clipboard up where she can reference the pictures.

Here's what I've done so far, but this is not for the faint of heart! It takes time...



I sure hope this will help her to make quicker choices each morning. Hopefully I'll be able to update soon with a summary of how she references her pictures. You know this flash of brilliance might be good enough for My Good Idea over at Family Fun Magazine. Do they pay for that? I'm starting a laptop fund... my inlaws were teasing me about using my blog to make a few bucks. Would I change the name to Money, She Made? For the record, I'd have to go with Laptop, She Bought. ; )

Batman's Reading Quest

Adventure Box time- Batman was informed that The Riddler had left words all over Gotham City with a challenge to Batman!

The Challenge- Batman must locate all the words and correctly read them aloud to Commisioner Gorden or ELSE!

Batman is expecting another challenge tomorrow which will include the words without RME visual cues and eventually sentences. The commissioner plans to surprise Batman at any point with a signal in the sky! Words must be read Batman! Please help us!


Batman finds his words

He reads them to the commissioner!

Disaster was averted! Batman remembers most of his words the first time through!! Great job Batman! Gotham City thanks you!!

Caps for Sale

Today we spent some time with those rascally monkeys in Caps for Sale. J3 loves to use glue.

Let's put on the cover!

Our 3yo cutting expert!

Lapbook in progress- we matched hats this morning and talked about who would wear each one. The chef hat he said Pasketti wears it- as in Chef Pasketti from Curious George (he's a chef!). There's also a mixing flip book to have fun with.

Color matching barrel of monkeys

J3 and I played a game where I say, "Monkey monkey in a tree throw the ______ cap down to me!" He really liked this. I had him stand on our climbing structure to pretend he was in tree. He had to throw the colors I named down to me. He sure does know his colors!!

J2 and I have spent a little time with Caps for Sale over the last week or so. We are going to do bunches of work with monkeys. A new puppet will appear and we started his first lapbook. I think he'll enjoy sitting with it again and looking at all the fun things inside.

E9 took this kinda blurry picture of me reading to I-5 and J2

J2 tries to trace an M. He loves to do "school" like everyone else. I'm going to encourage him to color the monkeys this week.

Stay tuned for more Caps for Sale. J2 (who will be three in a couple of weeks) works in spurts. Right now he is in a playdough phase. He and I have spent a lot of time with dough lately!

This Week's Sketch

This week's assignment was to draw something hot. Here we are!

I-6 a black batman tshirt on a hot day

R8 -a stove

E9-Chicken pot pie from the oven

When I brought this up to the kids they thought it was a terrific idea. So, there you have it our first try at Sketch Tuesday.

Today's Outdoor Hour

Today on our way home from the doctor's, we noticed a really glorious sky! It was filled with large cumulonimbus clouds from one end to the other. I knew we'd have to spend some time with that for our Outdoor Hour today. By the time we got home the storm was upon us and we've since had another. So, we observed from indoors today.

After checking Comstock's book for clouds, we thought we'd look for more details. We found them in our Usborne Weather Spotter's Guide.

I-6 loves clouds and storms! Did I mention that last week we had a very rare tornado watch and the first thing he did was take all his new superhero dress ups to a corner in the basement?

Here are the rest of our clouds- mine to the right, E9's to the left at the top and the last one is R8's.

Today was a great day to observe the weather. The temperature dropped at least 10 degrees during the first storm and tomorrow it will only be about 62 degrees. I wonder what kind of front that was that passed through, hmm?

We have a few more nature study topics on deck and of course there is this week's Outdoor Hour challenge which involves pollen. More on this a bit later.

Geography Game- Borderline

I stopped by my favorite consignment shop today after our well checks (remember those three June birthdays?) and one of the first things I found was this little card game.

E9 is setting it up right now so I'll let you know how it turns out. For $1.49 it was worth a shot!

Ok checking back in I can tell you it's a pretty fun game. We played two or three rounds. Basically, you have to correctly identify whether a region or country borders another. It also includes cards on natural and man made wonders of the world, geographical things like the prime meridian and international dateline, plus the tropics of Capricorn and Cancer and the equator. Tricky stuff! The object is to place cards in the discard pile based on what areas border and the first one to empty their hand wins. What a great find today!

Thoughts on Grammar

It seems lately that I've been called out a few times on the topic of teaching grammar. We use a method called "dictation". Honestly, I first heard of it when E9 was in his first full year of homeschooling. We dabbled in Sonlight for second grade until I decided on full time Beyond FIAR and that's what the program called for. I "think" the method has its origin with Ruth Beechick, but I'm not 100% sure on that. I never checked.

Basically, it involves reading a passage of text from a book to the student while they write it down- you know like dictation! After they write it, you check it and then you can work with your student on some grammatical elements either for correction or practice. I must admit that when we began this process 3 years ago I thought it was dumb and I totally did not get it. I would have to repeat myself and tell him where commas would be and he didn't seem good at it. I kept trying though and much to my surprise he got better and better. It didn't take long for me to say only, "there are two commas in this sentence," for him to place them correctly. Now when I read him the text, he can hear where the comma is supposed to be. E9 is an excellent writer for his age and I believe it is partly due to hearing and writing good examples from the books he is studying.

So, I'll just do a form of FAQ here and feel free to ask about something I didn't cover. I'd be glad to help.

• Have I ever or do I plan to use a formal grammar program? No, I have never used a formal program for grammar. I do not see the need for it at this point. E9 will be in 5th grade next year and has a pretty good command of written language. As he and my other children get older, I reserve the right to re-evaluate.
• How do I choose the passage of text? I choose the text based on what the student needs work on- sometimes. If I see a paragraph loaded with interesting punctuation, challenging spelling words, past tense, adjectives, etc. I will choose it. Sometimes, if I know I want to work on root words, then I'll look for a passage with lots of prefixes and suffixes.
• How much do I dictate? I generally do one sentence for first and second grade. First grade and K are copywork rather than dictation. Third grade and up it is at least one paragraph sometimes two.
• How often do I dictate? At minimum once a week. Sometimes I go for twice in a week if there isn't a lot of writing planned otherwise or if the assignment did not present much of a challenge.
• What does a week with dictation look like? I usually dictate on Mondays and correct the passage with the student. The next day they will do an exercise on the passage which includes correcting spelling among anything else we are focusing on. The following day he/she will re-copy the work correctly and the last day I re-dictate to check on improvements. As I mentioned above, if there isn't much to correct or focus on I may do a second passage by mid-week and correct and recopy from there.
• How do I know what to focus on? I think this question is really asking a couple of things. First is, how do I know what grammar elements to choose and that seems to imply that I need a framework of some sort. I'll speak to both. I choose items that are conventional for students of a given age/grade. Kindergarten and first graders should really be expected to recognize a sentence as a complete thought. The sentence should begin with a capital letter and end with a period. Then we add question marks. As the student gets older, we will talk about nouns, verbs, adjectives, etc. So how do I decide on any given day? Generally, I assess what the student needs work on, what we haven't done a lot of, what the passage lends itself toward- that sort of thing. I have my kids writing in lots of different ways so I know where their weaknesses are and try to reinforce those things.
• Where do I find the scope and sequence or what a student should know and when? I use three resources for this.
• Learning Grammar through Writing is a great text for teaching kids some editing strategies and has a lot of information on how to use good punctuation and other grammar elements.
  

• WriteSource 2000- another excellent resource for writers.

• What Your ____ Grader Needs to Know series- I use this for benchmarking what my kids should know in each grade. This way I know generally what each child should be able to do by the end of the year.

• Check your local school system- the one I'm in has the curriculum for some grade levels on line through the school website. You might also check at the state level. If you don't find anything, try some place else. I still occasionally reference the online information about each grade level's outcomes from the school system I taught in (and grew up in) in Maryland. While I don't suggest you need to align yourselves with what the public schools are doing, it is an easy way of checking out what is expected of most kids and to adjust your goals from there.
• What are other ways we practice writing? Other than these formal "mini-lessons", I try to do various other things with the kids. My kids love to write stories so I give them ample opportunity to do so. Journal keeping is another good way to go. I might assign other creative writing activities or have them write letters. No matter what they are asked to do, we always conference about their writing. Basically, I give them the assignment and let them write and write and write uninterrupted. When they are finished I ask them to do some spelling checking before I edit. Then I just circle misspelled words to start. During the conference we identify spelling issues which can sometimes be resolved during conference because they'll see their mistake. We talk about style and syntax. If a sentence is worded awkwardly, I will read it aloud to them to help them recognize that it sounds- off. They may dictate to me a better way to say it. I'll write it down. It might be a matter of word choice and we may discuss ways to choose a variety of words instead of always starting with "So," or "Then," I try to impress that just because it is grammatically correct, doesn't mean it flows well or sounds good or will maintain the reader's interest. Even the most struggling of writers don't seem to mind this type of conference. I prefer to call it coaching. When we edit and discuss their pieces together, they maintain interest in the project and are typically willing to make improvements.
  
• What about pre-readers and writers? When my kids are K age or preschool, I let them dictate to me stories and other long writing assignments. Sometimes I hand write them or I'll let them dictate to me at the computer where I'll type the piece. K and early 1st grade means copywork rather than dictation and usually it comes from their Reading Made Easy program which doubles for handwriting as well. Still, more complex writing can become their readers once they've dictated to me. Right now I-6 loves Batman and since he knows a bunch of word families using short "a" he will write them out and we turn them into books that he uses for reading practice. He loves to do this and it gives him excellent practice both in reading and writing. Young children can also illustrate their dictated work and retell the story to anyone who will listen!

Here are a few examples of the kids' work from this year:

R8's work from March- passage from Higgins Bend Song and Dance. You can see what I pulled out of the sentence if you click on the picture. As a second grader, she really improved over the course of this year- especially in confidence and spelling.

E9's work from Neil Armstrong- the left page shows an exercise from the week before and on the right is the next one I dictated. Note he had no mistakes that week.

From the Cricket in Times Square- another fine job

An example of a dictation exercise

One more thing...What do I use for notebooking the dictation? I use a spiral notebook. E9 used a regular wide ruled spiral for the first time in fourth grade. For the younger kids I print off handwriting pages in the size I want from StartWrite software (double sided) and then I have it spiral bound at Staples for a nominal fee. I make all sorts of journals and notebooks this way- some lined all the way and others with lined bottoms and blank tops for drawing.

Available through Rainbow Resource, I use this program to create all of our handwriting pages and copywork for the younger kids. It is pretty versatile and allows you to use several fonts (italics, manuscript, cursive) in varying sizes and there are pictures to have fun with. Plus, you can print varying degrees of dotted letters and even the letters with the directional arrows. And best of all, there are no workbooks to keep buying over and over!

I hope I covered everything anyone would want to know about how we use dictation at our house! If you have other questions I missed, please leave a comment and I'll try to address it.

Watercolor Tutorial and other FUN Art Stuff!

Ok, well it's Saturday and I've had a little time to poke around and follow some links today. I thought I'd share a few.

I suppose I should start from the beginning. So, I'll go with Sketch Tuesday first. The same mom- Harmony Art Mom who hosts The Outdoor Hour is hosting Sketch Tuesday. I've run across some other families participating and I think we'll try it out. The links are here and in my left sidebar. Each week she gives her readers an assignment based on an art subject or technique. The idea is do the assigned drawings and send pictures of the final product to her. She shares the results on her blog- you guessed it Tuesdays are the turn over days.



Today she has up a link to a watercolor tutorial over at Hearts and Trees . I enjoyed reading technique #3 and going backward to tutorial #s 1 and 2. I will definitely do these with the kids this week . She also has a terrific looking summer kit that would be fun to order...if my van didn't require so much of us lately.