Vacation journal entries

I should probably be posting these along with the posts about the activities, but sometimes he doesn't finish a journal until a day or so after I post. Maybe I'll go back and add them in anyhow, because I just love how detailed he's starting to get with these.

Weekly book shelf, 7/16

We're on vacation this week. Yeah! Before we left we stopped by the library to fill out Calvin's weekly reading program form, but I left his own log at home and actually can't remember what the four books were that he listed from this week. So I'm winging it, and these are books I know he read this week.

What Calvin read to himself this week...the Nate the Great I don't think was a new one to him, but he gravitates to that series every once in while. Little Squirrel's Special Nest is another in the Reader's Digest Animal Adventures series. The writing in the series isn't remarkable, and the moral lessons are pretty forced, but I like that the stories are firmly planted in the natural sciences.

Earth, by Keith Brandt, is a really great (out of print) book about our physical world and the forces impacting it. It covers the makeup of the earth, the solar system, and everything between, and is both interesting and informative. And The Island of the Skog is a cute book, but not expertly written—the story development isn't smooth and the "moral of the story" is a little weak.

Some things we read out loud this week...we're still finishing up The Little House in the Big Woods, and we've read a lot of other fun books out loud this week, but I can't remember any of them right now. Maybe because I'm on vacation.

 I'm still reading Proust—I'm on my second time through Swann's Way—but I've also picked up The Map of Time by Félix J. Palma. This will be the first vacation on which I read as much as I planned to.

Writing stories

Calvin seemed to be getting bored with writing the "this is what I did today" journal entries. That was actually not what I had intended the journal to be anyhow. Although I do realize that it has little, if anything, to do with my intentions, I'd wanted the journal to be a chance for him to try out lots of different kinds of writing. So far he's used it to write about activities, about books he's read, and also to record stories he's heard, but he had yet to write stories of his own. We've talked about the important elements of a story with some of the Five in a Row books, and he tries his hand at oral story telling most nights with his dad before bed. Earlier this week when he said he didn't know what to write about I suggested that he give story writing a try. He liked his first try so much he wrote another one the day after.

Weekly book shelf, 7/9

What Calvin read to himself this week...Squanto's Journey was an extension of last week's interest in the history of the U.S. and the books about Thanksgiving and Pilgrims. Honestly I didn't do a good job of working with him on this interest and I'm feeling badly about that. He read the books, he talked to me a bit about them, but my usual m.o. is to ask questions and knead that interest into rising and growing, but this week I just didn't get there. I guess you could call it an off week, but we'll return to Squanto's Journey because it is in our personal library—I chose it originally for it's beautiful images and for its depiction of the Native American story, and I'm still pleased with it, though I think it misses the mark a bit by painting the story in too pretty a light.

The Two Cars is a book we've read before and loved. Calvin got it off the shelf this week because we were going to the auto show on Friday. We are all fond of this book—the illustrations are traditional d'Aulaire, the story is a retake on the tortoise and the hare. Midnght on the Moon is part of Calvin's beloved Magic Tree House Series. And Train Song. It is one of our all time favorites: really a poem with a rolling rhythm, like that of a train going over the track, and the illustrations are rich and calming and beautiful.

What we read out loud this week...

I made a mistake last week. For as long as I can remember I've assumed that The Little House on the Prairie was the first in the Little House series, probably because that's the name I'm most familiar with, so when I said last week that that's what we were reading, I misspoke. We started at the beginning, reading Little House in the Big Woods, I just can't quite get that into my head. Obviously this is my first time reading the series, and I don't think it will go on my favorites list. I know a lot of people love these stories, and I like knowing that they are a true telling of life from that era, but I find the sentences distractingly simplistic. It feels like a list of facts instead of a story, which I suppose makes sense, it's just not what I expected. Calvin clearly finds the information interesting, but he's not as drawn to the book as he has been to others we've read out loud. I'm considering giving this to him as something to read on his own and looking for a different read aloud.

And on my shelf this week...I finished The Women of Brewster Place, by Gloria Naylor, and started rereading Swann's Way, in a newer translation, while taking notes on my new reading blog. If I keep this up there's no way I'll finish In Search of Lost Time by the end of the year. Oh well.

Before and after journal entries—chronology

Just a couple of weeks ago I sat down and spent some time talking with Calvin about interesting and varied sentence structure. That went over pretty well, so when this week he wrote an entry with a Proustian sense of chronology I decided it was time to tackle that "language arts" subject as well. It's actually not a new subject for us—when he was younger we out story cards in order after reading books, and his entries summarizing the Oz books has been good practice as well—so our chat was a brief one.

After he'd written his entry I asked him a few questions about it. "Were the raccoon prints and mole hole part of the game? If all those things happened at the end during the game, what did you do during the actual program? Of course, having been at the event I understood where the time warp had happened in the act of writing about it. (You might also notice some missing letters. Those had been erased for handwriting purposes, to make sure that they were readable, but they never got rewritten because he wrote a second entry instead).

The  journal "re-entry" gained not only a smoother time line, but also a little more sentence variety and clarity, and improved handwriting. Sometimes I think it's just a matter of concentration.