More about our trip can be found on the main page, and pictures can be found both there and in the Tulip Time photo album. These, however, were some of his favorite, or at least noteworty, moments from the trip.
5-12-11
5-13-11
5-14-11
We are on vacation this week, soaking up sun and surprising warmth that we didn't even have to leave Michigan to find. For years I have packed for vacations with the idea that, being a vacation, I'd have lots of extra reading time, but have yet to see those plans fulfilled. I have been known to stow extra books away in odd parts of my luggage only to unpack them, untouched and almost forgotten, upon our return home. The same was not quite true for Calvin—he seemed to squeeze in plenty of reading time, even though he spent all of his beach time flirting with the incredibly frigid water—but he mostly re-read favorites, like Nate the Great and some of the Magic Tree House.
Here's some of what Calvin was reading this week:.
Berkeley Breathed is the Bloom County cartoonist and we enjoy both his art and his story telling in Pete & Pickles. The book is a little dark—there's references made to death and loss (Pete's wife has died in the past), to depression (Pete, again), and to mistreatment of animals (Pickles in the circus). There is also allusion to modern art and geographic locations, and the tale of friendship and its happy ending is very uplifting. The illustrations in the book actually start out dark and gloomy, then end full of color and life, mirroring the movement of the story itself. We got this book for Calvin two years ago for Christmas and it has been a favorite ever since.
We still have exactly two chapters left in Glinda of Oz, at this point, but are really making headway with the Aeneid, and now he's asking to read the Iliad and the Odyssey. I was thinking I'd track down copies of the "For Boys and Girls" versions of these, also by Church.
And on my bookshelf this week... in fiction I finished Delta of Venus, by Anaïs Nin. In non-fiction I finished with The Monk in the Garden, by Robin Marantz Henig, and am waiting for my copy of Beasts in the Garden, the brand new Erik Larson, to arrive on Tuesday before I get started on a new one.
Book reviews, Weekly book shelf | tagged books It's been a while since I made new felt. It's been a while since Calvin asked for new felt (although he does continue to get his old sets out at least once a month for quiet play time), and then a couple days ago he became rather intent on having a volcano felt set. The first day he asked me to make him said set I told him to make me a list of what such a set would include, because I just couldn't get my mind wrapped around it. All the "volcano felt set" images I found when I searched online were actually dinosaur related (and you'll remember that Calvin's interest is most definitely volcano related, not dinosaur related), and it left me wondering. Calvin's list included a sleeping volcano, a volcano erupting with "volcano red" lava, houses, people, and sheep. Sheep?
When we sat down to work on this today I asked him to draw a picture of what his ideal volcano felt set would be. I guess he forgot about the people today. The sheep seemed to be the real goal.
I did most of the cutting, but Calvin selected the colors, did all the basic design work, and helped with the hot glue.
Having now seen him at work with the set I now understand (or think I understand) that what he's going for is a reenactment of the Pinatubo evacuation as we saw it on the National Geographic special we watched a while back. He reassured me, for instance, that the sheep in this picture is not being touched by the lava because he has been "evacuated" and is in a town far away from the volcano. "It's a matter of perspective," I was told.
Like many families we have a read-before-bed tradition. Usually that's when Calvin and I read another chapter, or two or three, in our most recent read aloud, these days that's usually an Oz. But we have a morning book tradition in our family, too. Since Calvin usually gets up in the mornings before Jon and I are (fully) awake, he selects a handful of picture books and brings them into our room to sit either in the sunshine on the floor or on top of us in bed and read to himself while we slowly blink the day into focus. The books then remain in our bed or on our floor until that night when I set them on the dresser. I have a stack of at least fifteen books still on my dresser from this week because I've been too busy to put them back, but also because sometimes he'll revisit one of them on a morning, and because I like to see the stack grow over the course of the week.
That's just a little reading anecdote, and whatever books he read in the mornings this week are still upstairs on my dresser, so here are the books I know he read downstairs this week. Earl the earthworm is a cute little story with lots of information about worms and their ecosystem. We both continue to be a fan of the Magic Tree House series, he's started on a Rome kick, and he also continued to devour Nate the Great in such quantities as our library had.
He read these two out loud to me this week while I worked in the garden. The first, Jip and Janneke, was a gift sent to him by my cousin who lives in the Netherlands. I wish this book was available here so that I could recommend it to everyone. It's adorable, and he's had a great time with it since it arrived on Tuesday. And he read two chapters to me from that perennial favorite, the original Winnie the Pooh, sans Disney influence.
We've used these for our exploration of Ancient Rome, and yes, I realize I've mixed my Greek and Roman myths here with the appearance of Theseus, but since we started with the Aeneid he at least understands how they intersect, and some of our other research books even explain the lineup of Greek and Roman gods.
We are almost done with Glinda of Oz, but not quite.
And on my bookshelf this week... in fiction I finished A Man Without A Country, by Kurt Vonnegut, and Brave New World, by Aldous Huxley, and am now reading Delta of venus. In non-fiction I'm almost finished with The Monk in the Garden, by Robin Marantz Henig, but it's a tad tedious so I'm still plugging away at it.
It has been a really long time since I shared any of Calvin's art, or really anything at all in this space other than book reviews. I wish I could say that was just a matter of not posting, but actually we haven't done much art as of late—we've been reading a lot of and playing make-believe, but other than that we've been outside and most of our activities have just been general day to day things that I've written about in the journal. I've been trying to sort out how I'll use this space on the site now that I use the journal space so much more, and so much more inclusively. Right now it's becoming mostly a book review site, and we're even in a transition on that front. Now that Calvin reads so much more on his own we are going through our read alouds more slowly and in the past I've only asked him to write reviews on the read alouds. Though we usually talk about the books he's read after he finishes them, and sometimes he still reads to me, he's not excessively fond of writing reviews so I haven't asked him to do so more often than before. So that leaves us with the weekly bookshelf post, lots of my own book reviews, and a handful of Calvin's for right now. But I have other plans in the works. I think we just go in spurts, that's all.
And today Calvin has some art to share. He specifically asked for these to be posted here. These drawings are a result of a rediscovery of the Egyptian hieroglyph stamps and a still active fascination with volcanoes. Note his creation of hieroglyphs for "volcano" and "dangerous lava", or so he tells me they mean.
