TINDERBOX

Education is not the filling of a pail, but the lighting of a fire. – William Butler Yeats

Reading update.

Alex’s plan to practice reading every day for a month worked out pretty well. I’d say we managed near-daily practice for about five weeks; since then it’s trailed off to about two or three times a week. In those five weeks, she did manage to make the leap from being a nonreader (or “emergent reader,” [...]

Read the rest of Reading update.

Actual books!

Alex’s regular reading practice continues. She missed a couple of days while we were on vacation, of course, and that combined with the fact that we’re now in the intermediate Progressive Phonics books, which are definitely harder, to cause a little resistance.
So we went to the library and sat down with Dr. Seuss’s Hop on [...]

Read the rest of Actual books!

Reading.

Alex is simultaneously in the middle of having three different chapter books read aloud to her.
We had been reading Louis Sachar’s Wayside School Gets a Little Stranger at bedtime. We’re almost done, so when we went to the library today I picked up All-of-a-Kind Family, and we had to start it as soon as we [...]

Read the rest of Reading.

“It’s the 1200s.”

Alex put on a princess costume this afternoon in preparation for the Pride parade. She started pretending that I was a poor orphan mistreated by my stepmother and stepsisters, and that she was going to adopt me. As she explained what my new life would be like, all kinds of medieval knowledge started coming out. [...]

Read the rest of “It’s the 1200s.”

Miss Frizzle’s Adventures.

We’ve loved the original Magic School Bus books by Joanna Cole and Bruce Degen (not the novelizations of the TV episodes) for a long time, but I only recently found out that they’ve written three history titles starring Miss Frizzle as well.
So far we’ve read Miss Frizzle’s Adventures: Ancient Egypt and Miss Frizzle’s Adventures: Medieval [...]

Read the rest of Miss Frizzle’s Adventures.