Week 6: Valentines, Valentines, Valentines:
Katydid, wearing her rose-colored glasses (they actually are rose-tinted, to help with her headaches) looks very Valentine-ish, doesn't she?
Most of the Valentines this year involved large amounts of glitter. I think this is Pip's. Pip wasn't interested in making Valentines at first. Instead, he spent a few days making cards for himself. You can see one of them above the Valentine in this picture, but most of them only involved drawing with markers and me writing dictated letters: W G M T... that sort of thing. I wish I had a photo, but I think the cards have all been used past the point of photographing by this point.
Pop was much more interested in the artistic value of Valentines:
Or, perhaps more importantly, the artistic value of glitter.
Chipmunk, on the other hand....
... Chipmunk just wanted to bite the tips off the markers. So he was confined to his high chair.
You can't tell that he colored his nose, mouth, and cheeks orange in this picture, can you. But he did. And his tongue.
Week 6 AND 7: Caves
Inspired by One Small Square: Caves, Farmerboy took his brothers "spelunking" in the closet. (In the closet because it's dark in there with the door closed.) Here you see him with his caving outfit: an equipment bag full of "food" and "first aid", and a camping lantern.
In week 7, we finished reading The Story of Caves, which ended up having quite a bit of information about Howes Caverns, the caverns we hope to visit soon. I suggested that Farmerboy might want to make his own cave one morning, and he decided to make one out of a cardboard box. Pretty soon Katydid and Gareth were also in on the fun:
Gareth's cave has stalactites, stalagmites, natural arches, fried egg formations, and gypsum (the white stuff on the wall.) It also has a stream.
In Farmerboy's cave, the stalagmites are made from clay. He also put fried egg formations and gypsum in his cave, and also cave bacon, bats on the wall, and a pack rat's nest in the "twilight zone" in the front of the cave. Then he got his Playmobil guys to be "spelunkers" (no plain old caving in our house). This particular Playmobil guy is outfitted with camera, flashlight, and laptop... in case he wants to look up the animals he finds.
To be honest, the suggestion to make caves was thrown out in desperation, but I was very pleased with the result. I had no idea that Farmerboy had absorbed such a lot of information about caves. In fact, he enjoyed this project so much that he has continued to play with and tinker with his cave for a good part of two days. He named his cave "Carlsbad Trap."
While the big kids made caves, Pip and Pop made owlish masks out of paper plates and also decorated some big cardboard letters I picked up from Dick Blick. I had been looking for these things for a long time, and happily, the little boys enjoyed decorating them:
Pop glued ANIMAL shapes on his A, but Pip is all about the markers. The ones Chipmunk hasn't eaten, anyway.
During week 6, we also participated in the Great Backyard Bird Count. Alas, we didn't see too many birds. But we did have pine siskins. And a couple of blue jays...
We also (collectively) decided that Gareth is going to be working on a high-school level designed-by-us paleontology course, which he is excited about. He's particularly excited by our discovery that some trilobite beds are just down the road. But those, unfortunately, will have to wait until the snow melts.
I love the creativity in those caves. Amazing!
I have a girlfriend whose 11 year old daughter lives with headaches. Do you think those glasses really help your daughter? Can you see changes in the headaches? If so I think I'll suggest this to her.
Posted by: mrs darling | February 20, 2009 at 11:32 PM
Will you be my homeschool mother? Such fun and creativity!
Posted by: Wendy@Well-Mannered Frivolity | February 21, 2009 at 10:33 AM
Mrs. Darling - the glasses do help, but they're not magic. Katydid has what's called "chronic daily headache", which means that her head hurts at least a little bit every single day. When she got these glasses, the pain lessened, but it didn't go away completely. I will say that the glasses + vision therapy have been the only things that have helped the headache. None of the high-powered meds the neurologist perscribed helped at all.
Her glasses have a 5% (I think) rose tint and are not polycarbonate. Our developmental optometrist said that polycarbonate lenses -- the kind they usually put in kids' glasses because they're shatter proof -- are often bad for headache sufferers. My advice is for your friend to find a good developmental optometrist (not a pediatric optamologist), and start there. A good developmental optometrist will catch a lot of things that a regular optometrist or optamologist won't.
Posted by: Angel | February 21, 2009 at 02:03 PM
My boys just went through a big cave phase. Have you seen the cave exploration in Planet Earth by David Attenborough? Mine ask to watch it again and again. It's truly amazing!
Posted by: Kathy | March 04, 2009 at 06:35 AM