Getting into the Halloween Spirit

So for our arts & crafts project this week, we took old milk cartons, cut the tops off, and painted them either black or orange.  Then we made silly faces on the fronts, which I then cut out.

We will be displaying these outside for Halloween.  I will probably put a rock inside each one to keep it down, and we may find a fire-safe light to put inside each, so that they all glow and get nice and spooky.

The Brain and Money

We've had a busy couple of weeks.  Adding onto our human body, we created an illustration of the brain.  Sathya was fascinated with it (online you can find anything, including real pictures and videos!).  He wanted to know why it was squishy and gooey because when he feels his own head, it is hard.  I explained the function of our skull in protecting our ooey gooey brain.  Sathya wanted to watch some live videos of human brains, but I had to draw the line.  He may not get squeamish, but his mother sure does!

If you look closely, you can see where we added the different lobes and their functions.  I tried to make it as simple as I could so that Sathya grasps the main point I was making: how complex our brains are, which means we must take care of them!  Taking care of them means eating healthy, exercising, and learning to nurture ourselves emotionally.

Frontal lobe: decision-making; personality
Parietal lobe: language
Occipital lobe: visual
Cerebellum: motor
Temporal lobe: memories; sensory
Brain stem: connection to spinal chord

We also have been working with money.  How to count, specifically coins, and what they look like.  This book has helped us tremendously as we work through these lessons:

I also got the idea of creating a money jar, which would teach Sathya and Anand the value of saving up for something special.  I got this idea from the book, A Chair for My Mother by Vera B. Williams:

In the book, a mother, daughter, and grandmother save up coins in order to buy a new chair because their old one had burned in a fire.  It is a tale of hard work, endurance, and most importantly, resilience.  We love this book (a Caldecott Honor book too).


So we created our own money jar.  The money in it will be used toward future vacations.  Each time a coin is placed in the jar, Sathya must tell us what coin it is and how much it is worth.

Stingray by Sathya Martin

A trip to the aquarium spurred an interest in writing a story about Stingray, a female stingray who has an encounter with a bad guy.  He came up with the character and the problem.

The story didn't get very far (my son dislikes writing unless it's centered around something else fun, like a story with a stingray puppet), but he wrote a couple sentences and made a hand puppet that could recite the story back to us.

Wyoming and the Feel Good Box

Sathya has always been interested in where things are.  And since he has been to over 20 states, last year we started learning about the different states, their capitals, and what makes them special. Yesterday Sathya learned about Wyoming:

So we start by taking some old cardboard (usually from a cereal box), and then cutting out the shape of the state.  Sathya writes the name; I fill in the capital and other key cities if any.  Then we practice going on the internet (research!), looking up that state's flag, plant, animal, flower, anything unusual or interesting about it.  Then we finish by listening to the state song. 

We don't always get to hear the song. Sometimes they are not available.  But we do our best.  And in the process Sathya gets multi-modes of learning (touch, hear, sight, etc.), which hopefully strengthens his ability to remember.  We review the states we've learned, and he forgets some, but he remembers most.

After we are done, we take it to his room where he has a large poster board of the U.S. map (hand-made), and we stick the state in its rightful place.  This teaches him location as well.

The state doesn't need to look professionally done or even neat.  The point is to get Sathya involved and interested in geography.  In other places, people, and other cultures.

Also in an interest to get my children more involved in dinner table talk, we created something called the "Feel Good Box."  Inside are cards written with the names of our family members, along with phrases like "I feel good when____" or "I admire_____ because _________."  Sathya and I spent a day working on making the box, decorating it, and decorating the cards. 

At night each of us draws a card and has to  either say something nice about that person, or something that he/she did that day that is worth noting (if a name card was drawn), or fill in the blanks if a non-name card is drawn.

Sathya looks forward to the Feel Good Box every night, and we get to end the day with positive thoughts.

Writing a Letter to Dav Pilkey

If you don't know who Captain Underpants is, then you are really missing out on life.  He is the famous superhero of the series by the same name, written by Dav Pilkey.  Pilkey's story is interesting: as a child in school, he was told that he would never make a living drawing and writing cartoons all day.  Boy were they wrong! 

The books are borderline offensive in the sense of: if you don't appreciate potty humor, these books are not for you or for your kids.  What I like about these books is 1) They have fueled an even greater interest in reading for Sathya, in addition to helping him make the transition to chapter books, 2) They are funny, even for adults, and 3) They do have coded messages in there that are quite honorable, if you can look through all the poop and fart jokes.

For our writing lesson, Sathya wrote a letter to Mr. Pilkey.  In one of the books, Sathya was forced to change his name to "Snotty Banana Chunks" by Professor Poopypants, who decided to change everyone's name since people ridiculed his name so much (gosh, I wonder why).  An address was given at the end of the book for those readers who'd suffered emotional distress from having had their name changed:

Sathya then wrote his very first "official" letter, which we mailed off on Wednesday.  I hope that there is no statute on letters and that he receives a response:

(If you can't read it, it says: "Dear Mr. Pilkey, I love Captain Underpants.  Your friend, Sathya Martin".)

Sathya's least favorite thing is writing (gasp! That's heartache for me, who is a writer), but by incorporating fun ways to do our lessons (without calling them "lessons"), he is at least getting his practice in.  Go, Sathya!