David « karenika

Reading with David – Winnie the Pooh

David says:
I liked that Pooh saved Piglet because Piglet was in danger and Pooh was being nice. I like that they make good choices. I wish I had friends like that because they are very nice to each other. I like the story of Eeyore’s birthday because it ended happily.

My favorite character is Pooh because he is the nicest of all of them because he does nice things for his friends like he saves Piglet, he finds the North pole, and he found Eeyore’s tail, and he throws Eeyore a birthday party.

My least favorite character is rabbit because he’s makes a bad plan where he tries to steal Kanga’s baby Roo. I also don’t like that Kanga tricks Piglet and gives him the medicine so she grows.

I also liked that Pooh had a good idea when he was trying to save Piglet because he didn’t do that anywhere else in the book.

Reading a book a week with my six-year-old son David is a weekly project for 2011. You can read more about it here.

2011 Projects – A Book a Week with David

One of the new projects I’m adding this year is to read a book a week with David. Since I love reading so much and since he’s just learning to read I thought it would be a wonderful way for us to spend time together. The idea is to pick books that would take 2-4 hours to read out loud. And I will likely read all of the book to him. I might ask him to read sections. I haven’t decided yet if it will be two-three days a week or a little each day. At the end of the book, we will create a little book log with his favorite quote from the book and some of his thoughts.

To capture all of our books, I’ve created a simple template to fill each week:

Just in case any of you are interested in doing something similar or using the template for yourself, here it is: download me.

My plan is to print these 4×6 cards regularly and put them in an album similar to what I used for my Weekly Gratitude project. I love these colorful albums from Target and they are less than four bucks.

The idea is to make sure we don’t just read but that David spends time reflecting on the book and tells me a little about what he took away from it.

Since I didn’t grow up in the United States and didn’t learn English until my teenage years, I haven’t read most of these books either, so it will be extra-fun for me. I’ve asked my awesome friend Kathy to send me a list (she’s a teacher) of books she’d recommend.

Here’s what I have so far:

Alvin’s Swap Shop series – Clifford B Hicks
Because of winn-dixie
Black Beauty
Bridge to Terabithia
Charlie and the Chocolate Factory
Charlotte’s Web
Chasing Vermeer – Blue Balliet
Cricket in Times Square – George Selden
Danny Champion of the World
Everything on a Waffle – Polly Horvath
Fantastic Mr. Fox
Freckle Juice – Judy Blume
Frindle – Andrew Clements
From the Mixed-up Files of Mrs. Basil E Frankweiler – E.L. Konigsburg
Hank the Cowdog series – John Erickson
Harriet the Spy – Louise Fitzhugh
Holes
Homer Price – Robert McCloskey
How to Eat Fried Worms – Thomas Rockwell
James and the Giant Peach
Last of the Really Great Wangdoodles – Julie Edwards
Lemony Snicket series
Lion witch wardrobe – CS Lewis
Little House in the Big Woods
Mad Scientists’ Club series – Bertrand Brinley
Magic Treehouse series – Mary Pope Osborne
Maniac Magee – Jerry Spinelli
Mouse and the Motorcycle (or most of Beverly Cleary – some are girl-oriented, but i think that’s fine)
Mr. Popper’s Penguins – Richard Atwater
Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH – Robert O’Brien
Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle series – Betty Macdonald
Pippi Longstocking series – Astrid Lindgren
Silverwings series- Kenneth Oppel
Stuart Little
the BFG
The Borrowers series – Mary Norton
the cricket in times square
The Golden Compass
The Secret Garden
The Tale of Despeatoux
The Twenty-one Balloons – William DuBois
The Westing Game – Ellen Raskin
Top Secret – John Gardiner
Tornado – (or most of Betsy Byars)
Trumpet of Swan
Tuck Everlasting
Wimpy Kid series – Jeff Kinney
Winnie the Pooh

It will be a great way us to spend time together.

As you can tell, I don’t have 52 books here so if you have any suggestions, books you loved as a child, I would love to know about them (pretty please?) and I will add them to this list so everyone else can benefit too. Just remember that my son is six years old and while I will read it, it still needs to be relatively age-appropriate.

Yey, can’t wait to start reading!

Crafting with David – Studying

Since David and I haven’t been crafting all that much lately, I thought it might be interesting to post some of our pages from the studying we’ve been doing lately. Apologies for the terrible quality photos.

For math, so far, we’ve been talking about places, comparing numbers, addition and subtraction:

for writing, we’re using lines from a stamp I have to practice upper and lowercase letters. So far, we’ve done a, b, c, d, e, f, g, h, i, j, and k.

and we’ve been doing reading with 3 or 4-letter words. So far we’ve done b, c, d, f, g, and h.

At the end of each session, he gets a mini-quiz and if he gets it all right, he gets a gold star, a little wrong is green star and then silver. We have yet to go below silver.

So far, so good.

Crafting with David – Father’s Day Card

This week’s craft was simple but meaningful.

This is the Father’s Day card David made for Jake. He picked the colors of the papers and he even laid out the hearts the way he wanted them.

And inside it says: “Happy Father’s Day Daddy. We love you. David & Nathaniel” He wrote it all.

Lovely isn’t it?

Crafting with David – Building for Lego Men

I’d like to say this amazing marketplace inspired us but really our project this week is so terrible that I cannot even remotely compare it to this incredible project.

I am really not good at doing these projects without detailed instructions and we’ve been running behind a bit so we didn’t have a lot of time this week to do it. But he really wanted to do this one. So we did it. We opened up some windows, made some floors.

We then cut up paper to cover it with.

I only had sparkly modge podge so it’s super-sparkly. And I am so not proud of it and almost didn’t even post it.

But David’s delighted and thrilled and loves it. He’s already put his men on it and they’re wearing parachutes so if they fall off, they don’t get hurt.

Amazing what a little cardboard can do when embellished with a child’s imagination.

Crafting with David – Tiny Book

When I saw this tiny book tutorial Lori linked to, I knew it was something David and I could do together.

We gathered our supplies. David’s favorite color is green right now so he picked a bunch of green.

We cut them all up.

glued to the paper.

And then made our book.

David punched out a bunch of birds.

and glued all of his treasures.

We added some more accents and then I gave him a sheet of letter stickers and he’s having a ton of fun with them.

Here’s what he wrote.

And here he is with his book.

An hour later he’s still adding to it and playing with it. That’s what I call a good craft project.

Crafting with David – Matchbox Bugs

This week’s craft was super fun and inspired by this (click image for source):

We got all the supplies

Wrapped the matchbox with felt and put a different one in the drawer.

Another view.

Then we used some beads and buttons to make the legs.

Pom poms, googley eyes, pipecleaner and a felt tongue and we were done.

It was too much fun so we made another.

Now they’re friends.

And now they’re kissing.

This was fantastic fun, highly recommended!

Crafting with David – A Banner for Amore

This week’s craft was super simple but very important. My mom turned 60 on Saturday and we wanted to do something for her for when we were going to Skype. Our initial goal was to make hats but we couldn’t do it with what we had at hand, so we decided to make a big banner.

We picked some paper.

And lined up our stamps.

And then stamped away.

see? there he is

and here it is finished. simple but gets the job done.

and here it is hanging behind us when we’re chatting with her.

we love you SO MUCH Amore!! HAPPY HAPPY BIRTHDAY!

Crafting with David – Thank You Cards

This week’s craft was another thank you card set and a little happy birthday one.

We gathered our supplies.

We wrote the insides first cause David had to write both his and Nathaniel’s name.

and he didn’t do so well on the first try.

Then he made the card for his teacher’s birthday.

And wrote the inside all by himself.

And then we finished the thank you cards.

They were Nathaniel’s birthday thank yous.

And that’s it this week.

Crafting with David – Writing his Words

This week’s craft was not a craft as much as writing.

David and I practiced all the words he’s learned to spell in the last few weeks. He wrote each of them 5 times. He was losing his patience towards the end but stuck with it.

He tried to focus hard.

And filled the whole page. Two pages actually.

We need to do this more often and we need to get back into the habit of practicing more words. We both feel lazy about it sometimes.

Crafting with David – Sight Words

This week’s craft was a project for David more than one with David.

Since I didn’t grow up in the US, I never learned English until I was much older and I learned things much more differently than a 5-year-old might so I had no idea how to teach David to read. And I know he’s interested cause now that he knows all of his letters, he reads things everywhere, all the time. So I asked my friend Lori how one learns to read. She told me that in her kid’s school, they make kids memorize sight words. Words that are very common and ones where the letters don’t make their “typical” sounds so they are hard to sound-out.

So I googled “sight words” and found this link with all the words broken by grade. I printed the pre-K and K words. We picked two colored papers to glue in the back:

I can’t glue to save my life so I stitched them instead.

Then I cut them all up.

And using my Bind-It-All, I made a little book of all the pre-K ones. (I’ll do the K ones later once we know if this is useful.) Here’s our little book: