This is actually the exact version I have, so that amuses me. Back when I was in college I read this book and thought it was absolutely charming, especially since the illustrations are in the style of the Color Fairy Books, which I loved.
Now this past week I have had Princess all by herself with another little girl. This seemed like the perfect time to read the book to her without accompanying complaints from the boys.
The Ordinary Princess is the seventh princess born in a magical kingdom. Everyone is sure she will be the most beautiful little princess ever and the biggest party is planned for her christening. Every fairy in the kingdom is invited, and they give her all manner of gifts, charm, grace, ability to dance, and then the last fairy comes. She’s been listening to all of the other gifts and thinks they’re quite silly, and she says “I give you the gift of ordinariness.” Immediately her hair loses her curl, freckles sprout and her eyes change to a muddy color that’s not brown and not blue.
She grows up and isn’t the perfect princess every expects and there lies the problem, so she decides to solve the problem and runs away. And that’s when the fun begins!
Last night as we were reading it, I got begged to read more, so we read about 30 pages in one night. I actually think I’ll stop writing now and see if I can convince the girls to listen to some more, we’re probably not going to finish it before the boys come back, which is a shame.
I’m gonna send you over to Natalie at Mouse Grows, Mouse Learns to learn about what other kids are reading this week!
I would link this up over at Mouse Grows, Mouse Learns, but I’m not sure it counts if I read it to them………..
We finished reading Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone, and as promised watched the movie together.
And this time I actually made fancy snacks! Go me!
Pretzel sticks dipped in candy coating and then sugar sprinkled on them.
Colby Jack cheese cut into stars.
Gummy bears, spice drops, and jelly beans (in a bag saved from when the first movie came out, ages ago). The spice drops were deemed “too spicy,” and the jelly belly jelly beans were turned their nose up at (I forgot I’m the only one in my family who likes jelly beans).
Hopefully I’ll have more time to plan ahead, as in not 2 hours, and I’ll be able to actually find something more like “chocolate frogs,” for the second movie.
All of this equaled three happy kids.
We’re thinking after book 3 we’ll stop until they’re older and more able to handle the scarier themes in the last 4 books. Any suggestions of other books to read aloud?
I’ve been seeing them at the library for a while, and kept almost getting them, but I always had another book about the same person that I got instead. This time I couldn’t find anything else on Robert E Lee, and I wanted to make sure to teach about him when we learned about Virginia.
Now, I might make a point to get these just for a general overview of the people. It’s a nice introductory biography.
I used them for Robert E Lee, Thomas Jefferson, George Washington, and Patrick Henry in Virginia. Yes, all 4 of them.
I did a couple of different things:
Robert E. Lee and George Washington- I simply gave them half a sheet of paper and found an image of the person. Then they wrote a sentence about something they learned. I learned Robert E. Lee was against slavery and freed all of his slaves before the Civil War.
Thomas Jefferson-We learned about how he was an architect for a while and how he designed Monticello as his “dream house,” so they designed their own dream houses. Here’s the outside of Superman’s house, don’t be fooled by the innocent flower, it’s a well protected house.
Actually all of the boys had quite the fortresses for their ideal houses and would have been able to withstand impressive battles.
Of course once you got inside, you’d see the pet room, and the Halloween room, that’s right he had a year round Halloween room.
And then in the attic there was the spiders. I think those were pets also.
We own the two I linked and I’m slowly collecting them all. My kids love these books and I love how they encourage my kids to think creatively and think of their own ways to do things.
After reading “Ladybug Girl and the Bug Squad,” Princess insisted we had to do everything they did in the book. So far we’ve decorated rocks, and
worked on creating our own heroes. Meet:
Blue Arrow- master of the bow and many more powers.
Green Cowboy- sharp-shooter extroidanairre.
Super Rapunzel- her sparkly jewelry distracts you as she takes you to jail for your evil ways.
Our plan is to go to Zilker park in our costumes and create a story about our characters using pictures. That’s the plan, we haven’t been able to do it yet. The one time we tried the batteries on my camera went out, so you see one of the few pictures I took on that trip.
But I have plans, boy do I have plans.
If you head over to Mouse Grows, Mouse Learns you’ll see more great books to read, and probably ones that aren’t all over the blogosphere already.
I know a few of you have mentioned in your posts having kids who love the Laura Ingalls Wilder series, and I saw this post over at Chasing Cheerios talking about a cool present she got her daughters.
On a somewhat related note, does anyone remember or know of any current book clubs that Scholastic does? I remember back when I started teaching Scholastic would occasionally offer in their book orders book clubs where the kid each month would get a book along with an activity to go with it. I got what was at that time the entire Dear America book series that way, along with some great activities to do with it.
It feels like ages since I’ve linked up here, probably because it has been ages, but we’ve been running around like chickens with our heads cut off for so long I can barely remember what books we’ve read.
Mostly lots and lots of joke books. Jeff and I are rather tired of endless rounds of jokes that make no sense and the kids laughing like mad men, so we endeavored to teach them what makes a good joke. This has resulted in the kids memorizing two jokes and telling them to us a MILLION times. You only think I’m exaggerating.
Ladybug Girl and the Bug Squad- I LOVE this book and this series. I’m trying to think of a fun activity to do with this, and everything I’m thinking of requires going outside in the heat or is way too complicated. I’ll keep thinking.
Ponyella- I got this as a surprise for my pony crazy Princess, and she hasn’t let it out of her sight since. It’s a total knock-off of Cinderella, but it’s still cute. Princess LOVES this book, there was a small meltdown when she couldn’t find it one night.
If You Give A……- We’ve been rereading these books in honor of the author’s birthday last Thursday, and I’m slowly putting together a unit study that I’ll share at some point. Mainly when I’ve thought it out beyond that I want to do one.
I realized I totally forgot to write about the books we read to go with Georgia, and the ones we weren’t able to get around to. So, that’s our post to link up to Mouse Grows, Mouse Learns this week.
I realized I didn’t particularly write a lesson for this one, so here’s one of the lessons that didn’t have any pictures or fun stuff to go with it.
I held up the covers of “Tough Boris” and “Pirates” and talked about fiction and nonfiction books. Since some of the kids are older the older kids were able to explain what they were fairly well. Then they made predictions of which one is which. I gave them more credit for knowing their children’s authors than they knew, or maybe it’s just the teacher in me that assumes everyone knows Gail Gibbons writes nonfiction and Mem Fox writes fiction.
Well, after our predictions I read the two, and they enjoyed both books. If you ever get the chance I highly recommend both of them, but in particular Tough Boris. It has a nice twist to it, and is very touching. The pictures tell so much of the story that isn’t there in the words, intentionally to my mind.
I’d have to say the pirate books were the biggest hit for my all of the kids. “Martin’s Big Words,” is a little over my kids head for the most part, but it was good to read.
Our library didn’t have any good books about Coca Cola, so if anyone knows a good one I’d love the suggestion.
So, I just discovered that blogger had eaten half of a couple of my posts recently because of an editing error on my part, so if the post I wrote about my boys and a birthday book we read made no sense to you head on back and it should make A LOT more sense now, or as much sense as I usually make.
Hmmm, I might need to take a break to eat some protein. I’ve heard that seeing spots is not a good sign. Ugh, my head hurts. I’ll be back in a few minutes.
Okay, I’m back a day later, and a dollar short. Okay, not the dollar short, but it is the next day, and I’m actually wondering why I’m sitting here when my eyes hurt and I’m tired instead of going to bed………. Okay, type fast.
Hmmmm….. I said “okay” way too much in that paragraph. Need sleep.
Irving and Muktuk series- I linked to all the ones we had at our library, my boys in particular love these two mischievous bear and their adventures trying to get blueberry muffins. I was not allowed to turn these books back in to the library
Good Knight- I only got to return it because they didn’t see me turn it in. Very cute story of a little boy who is being forced through the different steps of bedtime and how he views what's going on.
Bob Books- Princess has been carrying these around nonstop and mainly will read the first few red books, though she probably can read all of them. The boys went to the latter books but are picture reading, not word reading all of it. Now to actually sit down with them and correct where I’m sure there’s errors, but it’s a very cool sign. Did I mention Princess won’t let these books go? Seriously, loves the books. I will stop mocking them in my head now.
Okay, I’ve finished my scanning, now to take my sketch book to bed and color stuff.
Maybe. It’s been one of those weeks we’ve had great books that we keep reading over and over again. Maybe I’ll save those for another post.
I’ll go in order from least to most favorite:
Hear My Prayer- there’s nothing wrong with this one, but it didn’t quite work for us. It did lead to some great conversations about the prayers. So, I can’t say it’s bad, just wasn’t my favorite. Though I loved the illustrations. I think this probably would make a great shower gift, it feels like that type of book, does that make sense? Actually, I just thought of someone I know who is pregnant who would love this book. So giving her a copy.
The Brave Young Knight- This didn’t work as much for me. Maybe because I built it up a lot in my mind. The first book in this series “The Princess and the Three Knights,” is one of my favorites. For me that one worked on every single level, so I came in with super high expectations, and this one was more formulaic than I remembered the other book being. That’s not to say the kids didn’t like it. They really enjoyed it and the illustrations are awesome. So, if I was doing a rating, I’d say 3 out of 5. I’m sure it will still be read often.
Princess Grace and the Lost Kitten- I wrote about one of the other books in this series, and said it was a hit with all three. So was this one. Super duper cute, and great retelling of the Parable of the Lost Sheep. And who doesn’t love cute kittens? Okay, Jeff doesn’t, but he’s allergic to them, so no surprise. I’d hoped to play a “Where’s your stuffed ________?” game with this, but that happens so often in real life.
Warrior- okay, so I read this one, it’s a young adult novel, and it’s book two in a series, that I’m guessing is a trilogy. It reminded me in some ways of Eragon, though they’re not really anything alike, but maybe the flavor is similar. Either way, I really enjoyed this series. Basically, there are two worlds a human world, and a dragon world. The dragons have taken some slaves for humans and now a Starlighter has come forward who could rescue the humans. There is a definite gospel woven throughout and if you’re looking for the parallels you can see them. But, it’s not so artificially put in that it destroys the flavor of the series. Think more Chronicles of Narnia type flavor than say Left Behind, if that makes sense?
Anyways, I now need to go back and buy the first book in the series for this one to make more sense, and then I’ll have to buy the last book to see how it ends. Hopefully the author for this book will come out with the next one faster than Eragon does because at the rate that series is going I’m going to lose interest (and talk about a horrible movie adaptation, really why do people feel the need to totally ruin books in the movies?)
Here’s a more official description, because reading mine is not making as much sense as I’d like:
The Dragon Prince Has Hatched In book two of the Dragons of Starlight series, the stakes are raised when the foretold prince is crowned. While Koren and Jason race to the Northlands of Starlight to find the one person who can help them free the human slaves, Elyssa and Wallace strive to convince the captives that freedom is possible. Soon, all four discover that the secrets of Starlight extend much further than they had imagined. Meanwhile, Randall and Tybalt have returned to Major Four and struggle against the dragon Magnar, who has arrived to manipulate the governor. No one knows how the prophecy will be fulfilled, but one thing is clear: more than ever, the survival of the dragons depends on humankind, and they will do anything to prevent the slaves from escaping.
Okay, I’ve rambled enough. As usual for reviews, the books were given to get my opinion, as muddled as it is, no money exchanged hands. Though, I wouldn’t mind being paid for reading. I tried to convince my Mom to do that and she said she’d go broke doing that.
All week long I’ve been thinking about this book. I received a copy from Zonderkidz to review, and we’ve already read it about 3 or 4 times.
In the story, it’s Princess Joy’s birthday and she invites all the local prince and princesses to come to her party. They all say they can’t, so she invites the townspeople and servants. She spends the week before her party getting party favors ready for her guests.
Which is where we get to my boys turning six. See, they've spent the week planning what they want to give their friends, and how to best present the swords.. Princess Joy was putting aside what she originally wanted to focus on her friends. I don’t think Superman and Batman are that altruistic by a long shot, but they truly have great giving hearts. And it’s been so much fun watching them plan their party.
The Princess Parables looks to be a very cool series, I’ve received two of them to review, and we’ve loved both of them. I’m planning a totally different activity for the second book, hence why I’m not talking about it here. I’m looking forward to finding the rest of the books in this series. It says a lot for a princess book when my boys enjoy reading it too.
I’m gonna link this up to What My Children are Reading over at Mouse Grows, Mouse Learns. I’ll hopefully get another post up later today with more books we’ve read or more about the wonderfulness of my boys. There’s another book that’s been on my mind a lot this week in relation to their birthday, but that one I haven’t actually found a copy of.
Do you ever notice that when you sit down to write these posts you know you’ve read lots and lots of books but you can’t for the life of you remember what they were called?
And it’s always after I’ve returned a bunch of them to the library.
HITS OF THE WEEK:
Guess What I found in Dragon Wood- so cute and a fun twist on the “Guess what followed me home” style of book. It was fun to watch Jeff’s face on the other side of the room as he listened and didn’t know what the pictures were showing and he was oh so confused. Highly recommend this.
How to Make a Cherry Pie and see the USA- much like the international version she’s missing what she needs to make her pie, only this time it’s the cooking utensils. So, she flies all around the country to get what she needs to make a bowl, spoon, etc…. Still very cute and amusing.
Berenstain Bears and the Messy Room- I’m not sure if this copy is the one I had when I was a kid or not, but I certainly remember reading it as a kid and my Mom embarking on a cleaning tirade (that may be a slight overstatement), but either way it was cleaner after we read this. That’s my goal for my house as well.
Side note, I just sent off 4 garbage bags full of toys to go to Salvation Army, and I’ve got two HUGE tubs of books to head off to Half Price Books (and that’s just going through Jeff and I’s books, and not all of them either). We might have a book collection problem.
Not hits, but cute:
One Lighthouse, One Moon- gorgeous pictures, and simple text. Maybe a little too simple for my kids, but there’s so much you could draw from it, but they were not in the mood (too distracted by the tent we’d just put up).
I think I mentioned some of these last week, but here’s the majority of our Kansas books.
The biggest hits have been:
Mortimer’s First Garden- which Batman just saw as I was entering these into the computer and took it away
Aunt Minnie and the Twister- which got a rare request to read again
Twisted Tale- no picture of the cover, but it’s a super cute book about a family that goes through a tornado and how they have to solve the problem of their twisted up animals.
Misses
That Dancin’ Dolly- Which seems so cute, but it didn’t quite work right, aside from the kids asking me to sing it as a song, because it’s a song, so I tried my best to sight read the music….. kinda
Gramda Essie’s Covered Wagon- not on the carousel, but it was a little long for their concentration, and it was more of a journey type of book, no real action for the boys. I might try them on it again in a few years. It’s an interesting story about a little girl and how she remembers all of her moving back and forth and how much she had a hard time with that. I think that’s the other problem, it’s totally out of their frame of reference.
Well, that’s a quick overview. I’m off to take a walk with the kids, and then maybe when I get back write the rest of my posts for the week. That or go upstairs and work on some more painting. We’ll see.
Or at least the ones I was able to add into an Amazon Widget, but some of these I’ll be writing about again later.
Actually, now that I look at those books, I lied. Bear’s New Friend was a surprising miss. We’ve loved all of the other bear books, but this one just didn’t work for us.
But, popular ones:
Mortimer’s New Garden- I love the story of this mouse who is putting his faith in that little seed growing. It is a great lesson about faith and trusting God will do what he says.
Aunt Minnie and the Twister- a great story about a family and how they weather a tornado. This is part of a series, I checked out two books from the series, but haven’t read this one yet.
Raising Dragons- a little boy discovers an egg, and raises a dragon from it. His parents are convinced about the benefits of this dragon at first, but slowly come around.
Missing Sunflowers- the little boy in this story wants to grow sunflowers and finally gets to, but someone starts stealing his sunflowers. I love the message about how to deal with tragedy without it breaking you. My kids liked the little boy.
Ladybug Girl and Bumblebee Boy- had been recommended by several other blogs and I saw it in our book order and knew it would be popular. And it has been. It’s disappeared into both rooms and rarely been out of one or the other.
Well, that’s our books I can remember for this week. Head on over to Mouse Grows, Mouse Learns to see some other great books.
So back a month or so ago I got asked to review this book. At the time I thought, “Perfect, I’m really wanting to start focusing on writing with the kids.”
I’m happy to say I was right! I tore through the firs several chapters about writing theory, and the definitions of the different stages of writing. How to encourage it and then slowed down on the last half of specific suggestions.
Now, down to the nitty gritty of the review, who is this for? I’d say it’s aimed more towards parents than classroom teachers. This is for the parent who wants to give their child a little extra help or something else to do. It really reminded me of a combination of all of my education classes for reading/writing. It went into a fair amount more detail on writing, but I never took a specifically writing course.
The first half of the book, like I said before is more of a theory and a few ideas of how to inspired your kids.
The second half is where the wonder lies. It’s 52 different ideas for getting your child writing, and the great part is she gives ideas for each of the different ability levels she describes in her book. So, if your child is a scribbler, than here’s ideas to help them move along. If your child is a speller, here’s some ideas to help move them along; so on and so forth.
I’m already thinking how I can incorporate many of these ideas into my homeschooling, and have done a few little things, and am in process of setting up some of the bigger things.
I totally recommend this book if you want to encourage your child’s writing, I’m loving my copy and think I might reread it soon.
I’m going to link this up to Works for Me Wednesday to spread the word of my loving this book.
Bother, I accidentally saved it and now it won’t let me mess with the size settings. Oh well.
So, a few of these are not from that unit, and most of our tour around the world was not actually Christmas books. See, my library didn’t have huge amounts of those books, so I was kinda outa luck in that area.
Biggest Hits:
Bridget and the Gray Wolves- My kids loved the story of a little girl who went from timid to brave and how it happened.
Hansel and Gretel- My kids thought the whole concept of tricking a witch was hilarious (and ummm it was not that version, just the story).
Gingerbread Man- This one it actually was that story and it was a huge hit
Elves and the Shoemaker- another big hit. I did it with the elves saying a rhyme, which the kids thought very cool.
Not big hits, but good
Great Joy- I love the art work, and the story about a little girl trying her best to reach out to a poor man. It’s a little too serious to be a big request here. Come to think of it, it reminds me of “The Christmas Miracle of Jonothan Toomey.”
Jingle Bells- It takes the Christmas song and uses that tune to tell a short little blurb about Christmas around the world. Only problem being it tells you about each country in 2 sentences, so not really enough to explain anything. But, it’s a good introduction.
Still looking forward to reading to the kids:
The Hawaiian Night Before Christmas- It’s a little book (literally) and it looks to be so cute.
The Hawaii Snowman- another book that looks to be really cute, they just came in the mail at the end of this week, so it’s going to be fun to read these as part of our Hawaii unit.
Any suggestions for books about any of those countries? In particular do you have any kid friendly ones about Saint Lucia or Saint Nicholas? Our study of Sweden really suffered because I didn’t have any really good books to tie hooks into their Christmas traditions.
So, first I wanted to say I had the coolest experience last night of getting to see my kids are actually learning.
As we drove home last night they started talking about how the “Santa guys in that other state that is cold play tricks on people (the Yule Lads of Iceland) if they’re bad, and in that other place with the cookies they get coal, so what happens to the bad kids in Texas?”
So, we had a very long discussion about what he might give bad kids. It was very interesting……..
On to books.
We read LOTS, but of course as soon as I sat down to write this I couldn’t remember exactly what we read and some of the books wouldn’t show up in the widget, so I didn’t add them, but here’s the biggest hits of the week:
1. Merry Christmas Big Hungry Bear- cute story about a mouse who doesn’t want to share his presents with the bear that lives up the hill, but has decide what he will do. The illustrations totally make this story, and there are other books in this series, but I don’t remember if I have them.
2. Mistletoe and the Christmas Kittens- very cute story about a cat who is different and how he decides to help others even if they don’t like him. (I think we read it at least 3 times).
3. Christmas Miracle of Jonothan Toomey- I really liked this, it’s a longer story but a good message.
Miss
Mama Talks Too Much- it just never quite jelled for us, but it’s an interesting concept. I got it because I’m sure I do this to my kids, and I know my Mom did it to me.
Spookley the Square Pumpkin- I liked this because it’s a cute tale about how it’s good to be different sometimes, and the moral is fun.
The Trojan Horse- Jeff caught Batman trying to sneak this on the camping trip. They were very intrigued by soldiers hiding and then defeating the bad guys.
The Grouchy Ladybug- This was my boy’s favorite story a few years ago. It was to the point I tried hiding the book. Now three years later I still remember reading it 5 or more times a day. Ugh. But, it’s a great book for telling time and we were learning about ladybugs, so out it came.
The Very Clumsy Click Beetle- quite disappointingly the battery was dead on the library copy. That kind of kills the gimmick of this book. Oh well. It’s still a good story about persevering.
Monster Mischief- can you tell from the list of books my kids have noticed Halloween is coming? This is a fun story about some monsters that are making a rather nasty stew, and then it spills, but the problem is solved and it’s a fun ending.
I forgot to put it in, but our big miss of the week was “Alphabet Stackers,” it was trying to be an alphabet acrostic book, but that made some of the poems very forced and confusing to my guys and to a lesser extent to me. So, that got a big no vote.
Now head on over to Natalie’s blog over at Mouse Grows, Mouse Learns to see more great book recommendations.
When we went to the library last my kids were just grabbing books like crazy, “Can I get this?” So on and so forth. But most of the books they grabbed were holiday books, and while I’m not opposed to the occasional out of season book, it seemed like that was all they grabbed. So, when they grabbed all those snow books, I relented a little. They got two.
Snow on the Farm- It’s really rather cute, and nicely done. Kind of reminiscent of Little House in the Big Woods in feel.
Snow- Ummm, my kids are pretty much too old for this, but it’s a cute little snow book and they had lots of fun looking at the pictures of snow.
Pappy’s Handkerchief- This is one from our Oklahoma studies. I got it because I felt bad about putting back a book about African Americans (that was definitely way TOO OLD, not for 5 year olds). And I got excited thinking this would be a great one to introduce so many concepts about Oklahoma. Ummm, it fell so flat. They couldn’t concentrate for it at all. It’d be great in a few years, just not yet.
A Taste of Honey- Our first hit of the week, to all involved. And it totally reminded me of my kids. The Daddy is making a sandwich for his daughter and she’s asking where the honey came from, “Then where Daddy?” So it goes through the whole process backwards. From the store, to the bee farm, to the hive, and so on. Super cute.
If You Give a Pig a Party- I love her books, so I was super happy when these were the books at Chik-Fil-A when we ate there today. So, now I have a couple of copies of the “Mouse….. School” book, and a second or third of “Moose…. Muffin,” but who doesn’t love these books. So many great activities to do with them.
And as always there were others, I just never remember the ones that were “Wow” books while I’m writing this, but those last two are the best in my mind.
What do these states have in common? Well, not much aside from both being lots of dry desert to my mind. As to the reality of that, who knows. But that’s how they are in my mind. I have a lot of theories that don’t have much to do with reality.
The stars (to my mind): The Wheat Doll- a cute story about loss and getting back. The girl in this book loves her doll, but is forced to leave it behind when there is a bad storm. She goes back to find it, but is unable to. At the end there’s a fun surprise twist that we all enjoyed.
Snowshoe Thompson- Cute story about a boy who's father is on the other side of the mountains in Nevada, and how he’s sad because the mail can’t go through. Snowshoe Thompson offers to cross the mountains and make sure the mail gets through. I had visions of all sorts of cute activities to do with this, but I could just imagine how it would end, and we don’t need another ER visit, nor do I need to give my kids ideas about playing on the stairs.
Trout, Trout, Trout- cute rhyming book.
Coolies- I wrote about this earlier, but I thought it was a good way to talk about the railroad and the workers. I will admit the kids weren’t as excited about this as I was, except the part where Iron Man came down and rescued the workers. Recently in our house Iron Man has been involved in a lot of historical things I never knew he did.
Books we’re indifferent on: Sierra- It’s a poem. I’m not a big poem fan to start off, and then it’s rather long. We didn’t really finish it. I did figure out that I need to introduce the kids to more poetry, sigh, poor me. Okay, I do like some poems, but not most. I’m a horrible example.
So, look what Princess and I lucked into while we were in Dallas this weekend visiting the grandparents (it was Granddad’s 70th birthday).
Can you say one very excited and scared three year old? I had to practically force her to go take pictures with all of them except R-2. R-2 she was way too excited to stand next to.
The boys sadly were with Jeff and missed it.
All of the characters were very friendly and did their very best to make her feel at ease. And they signed the book I very hurriedly grabbed for the boys.
Princess finally resorted to, “I’ll do it if you go up with me.” So, I got to pose with one or two of them.
So, my kids are now very happily reading Children of the Force over and over and over again. After all Trooper Rex signed it.
So, that’s what we’re reading this week. Head on over to Mouse Grows, Mouse Learns to see what others read.
