New Year

It is back to homeschool reality after the holidays. It was fun having Jacob around the house, and our Christmas season stretched into the New Year and we all enjoyed it. W was eager to jump back into his usual routines. The snow which the boys enjoyed so much is now melted away and hardened into icy patches. The snow people have gone away for now, but are sure to be reincarnated after the next big snowfall. Last week we "rowed" Katy and the Big Snow by Virginia Lee Burton, not the perfect week for it but it was still seasonal. W was already familiar with the story and it has nice illustrations that the readers can spend a long time looking at and discussing (especially the Geoppolis map page). It gets kids thinking about directions.

This year I couldn't bring myself to make resolutions, although one thing I am striving for is finding a way for myself and the boys to keep active inside even though it is freezing outside. Some solutions which I have found extremely helpful include: indoor basketball, dancing to CDs (especially Imagination Movers and Taylor Swift), the Fisher-Price SmartCycle (Toy Story, Thomas the Tank Engine & Bob the Builder games), and yoga for kids DVDs that we can do together. So far I have resisted the rather strong urge to invest in a "real" video gaming system now that there are some neat interactive games on the market now although I would refuse to buy anything violent. I was never much for video games (in fact my Mom used to be much better at me on the original Nintendo Mario, she was the original gamer Mom!)

Today we are "rowing" a non- Five in a Row book but one that could easily be one: The Year at Maple Hill Farm by Alice and Martin Provensen. It covers each month and shows the changes that each season brings to the animals of the farm. We are also reading Farmer Boy by Laura Ingalls Wilder as a family read-aloud, and have a book club meeting coming up next week so we are working on quilt blocks as a long term project. January is actually a great month for reading both of these books, which begin in January and each span a year.