Michigan: Clever Beatrice

 

When researching books for Michigan, I discovered this gem of a tall tale called “Clever Beatrice”.  It’s about the cutest books I’ve seen, and one of the few tall tales that’s about a girl.  To make matters even better she win the day by outwitting her foes, not by being the prettiest or anything like that.  She rather reminded me of Jack from the many and varied Jack tales (Jack the Giant Killer, Jack and the Bean Stalk, the trickster archetype).

 

After reading the book I thought about some fun ideas for outsmarting or out-tricking someone, but none of them seemed age appropriate, and I also didn’t want to encourage my children to start acting like her about certain things…….

 

 

Instead, I googled visual puzzles, and came up with many to solve online, and a few that were find the hidden picture puzzle, but nothing too clever.

 

Then I found a heart tangram.  This seemed like a nice little math puzzle and some fun for the kids all at the same time.

 

I printed it out and set them to cutting and coloring.

 

They happily spent several minutes attempt to put the hearts back together.  A quest, that I admit stumped me at first, until I figured out the trick.  Which sadly I still haven’t figured out for the square tangram.  Isn’t that sad?

 

I’m going to pop over to All Things Beautiful and share this on her Summer Learning Fun.

Michigan: The Log Cabin Quilt

Jeff’s working late, so I’m having fun working through my backlog of things to write about.

We’ve just had a crazy CRAZY spring, and the summer isn’t looking to calm down.  These are all things done weeks ago.

They’re not super exciting as far as activities go, but the books are so wonderful that I have to share them.

“The Log Cabin Quilt is about a family that moved to Michigan after their Mom died.  The grandma comes with them, but their Dad is sad.

One winter night he’s gone out hunting and they see he hasn’t gotten back.  It’s cold and they’re sad, and they try something unusual to help with the cold.

One of the major plot points of the book revolves around “chinking the cabin,” chinking is putting bits of mud into the holes between logs.  I loved the chinking activity Phyllis did with her kids, but with less than 15 minutes for our activity, that was not an option.



So, we colored in our chinking.  Then we drew how we would decorate our cabin if we were trying to make it feel like home.

Apparently my boys would put random bits of color in their houses.  Actually I think he explained to me it was a tube that would deliver the things he wanted.  He went on to describe the things, and it was a long and bizarre list.

Babies, toys, candy, food, more food, and then some more food.  Apparently my kids are starved, and I never feed them.  And, I’m still wondering about the babies.  His theory was he’d send them back when they started crying.