The next book on our “Getting Ready for Kindergarten” list was Froggy’s Best Babysitter by Jonathan London and illustrated by Frank Remkiewicz. This would be a great book for teaching concepts of print, styles of text or even onomatopeia but we decided to continue making connections. This worked very well for us because a favourite movie of ours lately has been Mary Poppins. Last time we watched it I made sure to point out the part at the beginning when Michael and Jane are reading their father their own advertisement for their new nanny. After reading the book today I challenged my children to come up with their own qualification for their “Best Babysitter”. We decided to share their ideas in a movie.
Month: March 2012
Challenge #1- Getting Creative with our Book Storage
I now have a fair number of blogs that I follow through my RSS feeds and other methods. One of those I added a month or so ago is Honey Bee Books. Through this blog I found out about the Little Book Adventure of 2012. This is a cool initiative created by My Little Bookcase out of Australia. I know because we are in North America we will not be eligible for any of the prizes but for us that is not a reason not to participate. I am always looking for new and excited literacy projects and challenges with my kids and this is a perfect fit for us. So I registered us and we got started.
Challenge #1: Get Creative with your book storage.
We have A LOT of books in our house. It is a bit of a pet peeve of my husband’s but he has slowly learned not to complain when I bring home more books for the kids – he complaints are futile and fall on deaf ears. The problem we now have is that we have so many great kids books but are running out of places to put them. I am not ready to purge but I want to make sure we can find those great treasures when looking. This was a perfect task for us.
Most of the books are in the kids rooms but I wanted to start included some in our playroom so I hit pinterest for ideas on easy, and inexpensive book storage. I quickly came across rain gutter book shelves that would be perfect for the location I had in mind. I pinned a few sites but the most useful was at Raising Olives. She gives a great step by step guide for installing shelves and of someone as unhandy as me this was perfect. For full disclosure I didn’t end up doing most of the tricky parts. My dad is who I usually call on for all things handy and he did most of the cutting and installing. I also knew that I wanted to personalize the shelves for the kids and over at More than Mundane she shared with me how acrylic paint worked when she decorated her shelves.
So they turned out pretty good. I am not an artist but I did manage to paint each child’s name on their shelf and then I let them decorate them with stickers I picked up at the dollar store. In total the three shelves, completely installed was less than $100. The gutters themselves are rather inexpensive but the brackets and the ends add up quickly. I wanted them pretty sturdy since little hands will be putting books in and taking them out so I used 3 brackets on each 5 foot shelf. I also put Michael’s shelf at the bottom so he can reach his books, and it also works best as he can’t reach Kaitlyn’s books – which he like to rip sometimes.
Our New Playroom Book Shelves!!
Once the new shelves were up we decided it was time to organize ALL our kids books. These new shelves were going to hold feature books. Every month the kids can change which books they put in the shelves but these are to be their choices only (Mommy and Daddy have no say)!
We have other book shelves in our house for kids books. Right now both of the girls have castle book shelves in their rooms. We working on deciding what style to build Michael (and by we I mean Grampa who is the handyman). For now Michael’s book are just stacking on his toy shelf in his closet.
Kaitlyn’s Shelf
Eileen’s Shelf
Michael’s Closet
There are a couple of other locations of books around the house. In the playroom we have a bin of mini board books that are at perfect height for Michael. In our kitchen island there is a shelf with ABC books the kids often read when I am planning dinner. Finally, in the great room there is a small unit that has book that I have picked out for the kids. These are often books we have done activities around or will be reading soon. Any books that I blog about (and all our getting ready for Kindergarten book) will be added to this shelf.
We had fun on our first challenge and look forward to challenge #2!
Getting Reading for Kindergarten
When you register for Kindergarten in our school board (Grand Erie District School Board), one of the items in your package is the calendar “Kindergarten: Ready Set Go!” This is a collaboration of a number of organizations included school boards, heath units, libraries and the Ontario Early Years Centre. Throughout the calendar there are pages to help parents prepare their children for Kindergarten.
For February the information was on immunization requirements. My children are up to date on their immunizations but tracking them is a pain. In this age of electronics I don’t know why I can’t just authorize my family doctor to send the records to the health unit every time they get a new vaccination. It just seems it would save a lot of time and man power on every end. But I digress from the reason I am blogging.
In each month there are 2 or 3 books listed. When Kaitlyn was getting ready for JK we read all the books listed but this year I thought we would do something a little more formal with Eileen. We are going to be reading all the book in the calendar and sharing the activities we do for each book. My goal is to do this every Saturday or Sunday but we will see how that schedule goes. We are starting a bit behind the eight ball. We didn’t register until February so we missed January (we will try and make those books up later). It took a few weeks for the February books to come in so we will work on collecting our books earlier but hopefully we are on a roll now.
Our first book was Happy Valentine Day, Curious George by N. Di Angelo.
I realize Valentines Day had already passed but I thought we could read the book anyway. This is a very cute Valentines Day book, with fold out flaps. For us that means we keep it well out of Michael’s reach! For teachable moments, the flaps give a great opportunity for making predictions. In the story George and the man in the yellow had invite the neighbourhood over for Valentines Day. They decorate the house, make cookies, and make valentines to exchange. Like many children George finds a box and is immediate intrigued with the box. He set to decorating the box to put his valentines in. This would have been a perfect book to read before Valentines Day and then we could make a box for our Valentines, but I wasn’t going to let that stop us. Instead we made our own special treasure boxes.
I had my niece and Eileen for the afternoon last Sunday while Kaitlyn was at a birthday party so I thought it would be the perfect time. We went to the dollar store to find boxes. I didn’t want to use cardboard so that they would be more sturdy and last longer but you could easily use cardboard boxes. I also let them each get a package of letter stickers. I wanted them to practice spelling their names on their boxes but other than that they could decorate them any way they wanted. First I let them paint the box any colour they wanted. Of course they both picked pink. I didn’t have any pink paint but that never stops us – we learned that when you mix red and white together you get pink.
After drying Gramma had come by so she helped the girls spell their names on their boxes. Then I gave them a wide variety of materials from our craft bins to decorate their boxes. They mostly picked hearts, jewels and stickers to decorate. Many stuck on themselves but a few needed to be glued.
They turned out pretty cute – and we could make a connection to the book we had just read. We decorated boxes just like George!
Mommy's Lessons 