Read it , Play it!

by The Oppenheim Toy Portfolio
This one I am definetly buying!!
Much along the "Five in a row" curriculum that I love. It encourages the reading of young children's "classics" and provides different activities to reinforce the concepts or story line of the book.
They also have the classic books seperated into different the different categories of Language, art, math and science.
I was excited to see a lot of our favorites covered in this book, chicka-chicka boom boom, Joseph had a little overcoat (Isaac's favorite), Where the wild things are, When I was little, and The very hungry caterpillar.
The other nice thing is that even though it was geared towards the pre-school set, we all had a blast with the activities.
Also, many of the books we already owned or could easily get from the library.

Route 66

By Tim Steil
Our family, like everyone else who has seen the movie "Cars", is suddenly enthralled with the nostalgia of Route 66. Ok, so Seri and I more than the others. We were hoping to travel it from LA to Amarillo when we visit Texas for a reunion this summer, but due to time constraints and finances we are planning it for summer of 08.
Anyhow this was a great book. A short read, it features tons of photo's and stories of not only land marks but also the people associated with them. The chapters are seperated by state, starting in the East and going West. It also gives out just enough background information as to make it interesting and not extremly boring.

Help! There's a toddler in my house

by Nancy Kelly

This is a cute book of ideas with activities to keep toddlers entertained and hopefully learning a bit, but mainly just having fun.

They put a twist on it and listed the activities by the rooms in the house in which they are usually done.

Most of the things are common sense, like sock match, blanket parachute, fingerpainting with appelsauce and food coloring. I found myself thinking that I didn't need a book to tell me to do these things. But as I read I noticed how nice it is to have all these ideas in one place. Life happens everyday and it is so easy to forget to do these little things with the kids in the process of our busy day. It is nice to look through it and plan for one of these activities. With that said, tomorrow Isac is going to help me wash the dishes (it's his night anyways) and then we are going to mop the floor with washclothes, just to be silly. I'm looking forward to it :)

Not a box

By Antoinette Portis. This is a must have in every home with creative children. Having moved recently I was forbidden to get rid of our big boxes as we had many and they soon became stores, tunnels, castles, forts, race cars, and who knows what else. I did leave the boxes out longer than necessary but instituted a rule that when they get dilapatated I can throw them out. the others have a home in the garage.

This is a simple reader but carries much more in meaning as a child tries to explain to an adult that this "Is not a box!"

The theme is carried out through the book jacket that feels like cardboard and has a "this side up" box printed on the back.

The Successful Homeschool Family Handbook

By Ray and Dorothy Moore, this book was previously published as Home School Burn Out.

I did enjoy this book, but probably not as much as I thought I was going to. It seemed like an awful lot of fluff to get across a simple homeschooling method. I did like that they included a lot of family stories about how families were able to make their method work. Not sure if it is right for us though.

There are a few things I picked up,

"Children are not little buckets to fill up, but little trees to grow".

"You are the greatest gift that you can give to your children. And your best for your children under your circumstances will likely be far superior to the teachers best with nineteen other children under her circumsatnces".

Man, is that ever a good way to put what I experienced when teaching a third grade class long term. There were too many children, too many other things to be done, too many of everything and not enough of me.

Baby Signs

Baby Signs by Linda Acredolo was a great book for introducing the concept of signing to hearing babies. I especially liked that it had pictures of babies using their signs and a picture dictionary at the end showing the most common used baby signs.

However, I don't think we will be able to use much from it. When teaching a baby to communicate using signing you have two choices. The first is to teach them signs as a bridge to use until they find a vocal vocabulary at which time the signs are abandoned. With this intent the signs can be any physical sign that works for the baby, thus an airplane may be referred to by the child raising both arms out to his sides. The second choice is to teach signing as a second language which will be carried on even after the vocal vocabulary is present, in this instance the signs taught will need to be ASL.

Since we are all learning ASL through classes we have decided it would be simpler to just teach Sariah the ASL signs. We are eagerly awaiting for her to use her first sign which may not be for another two to three months, but we are sure having fun with her in the meantime.