If you give your kids an...

... instrument, or the materials to build one, they will create a band. They will name their band Bikini Wicked Wake Up. They will ask you to get out your own guitar and play the bass line to Seven Nation Army. They will make up their own words to the song because they can't remember the real words. And you will laugh. Really hard. And smile. Really big.

(I was really hoping the video we took would load, but since its not working as of right now, I'll have to give you kinda sorta actiony shots. Should the Powers That Be be more cooperative at a later time, I will add the video then. Telling you its hilarious would be an understatment.)






If you give a kid a ball and some safety cones, they will create a makeshift bowling game.




If you give a kid a croquet mallet, he might surprise you by actually playing the game. With new rules, of course, because who actually understands the official rules of that game?




If you give a kid some bocce balls, you'll get an awesome picture that captures just how silly and insane this sweetie pie is...and then you'll wonder if it was a safe idea to give him really heavy solid could-possibly-be-used-as-weapons type balls in the first place.

A dirty bathtub means "great day".

At our house, one way to measure the success of the day is by seeing how dirty the bathtub is after the boys are done taking a bath. Let me tell you, today was an awesome day. Filthy bathtub, happy boys. I'm not sure what was so exciting about ripping around in the dirt/mud/sand/grass/etc. today, but the boys did it and had a fabulous time. Totally one with the earth, I tell ya.

Today's (non-dirt) adventures included a quick shopping trip where it was once again demonstrated that $3 will not buy as many toys at Walmart as it will at a garage sale. Why not? Well, let me explain it to you right here next to the Transformers action figures and the nice Wal-mart employee who is giggling at my speech.

Another adventure included our daily game of badminton, and figuring out that badminton rackets purchased at a garage sale aren't going to last us through this season because someone else has already whipped the crap out of them. Save money and compromise quality? Spend more on something that might last longer? Such lovely life lessons we are learning.

We also experimented a bit in the kitchen, mixing up a batch of puppy chow (you know, rice chex, PB, chocolate, powdered sugar...) and then Iggy suggested we put it in the freezer. Sure. Why not? Well, guess what? Experiment a success. Frozen puppy chow "tastes a miracle", which is the highest compliment Iggy and Ooky can give to anyone about their cooking.

Last but not least, we played another round of our favorite dessert game called Sweet 100. A yours truly invented game which requires a 1-100 chart (we have a large laminated one we found at a garage sale for a dime), some candy, a die, and some place markers. This is how you play: Mama lays the 100 chart on the floor (ours is 1-10, next line 11-20, and so on). Mama puts a small candy (M&Ms, Mike & Ikes, Smarties, etc.) on each number. Iggy and Ooky take turns rolling our (10 sided) die and move the number of spaces as detemined by the die. They can't take the candy unless they can identify the number they have landed on. Who knew that four year old Ooky had any clue what 86 or 57 or 39 were? Certainly not his mother. (Well, now she does...)I guess I'd never really asked him. The ultra cool thing was now that I am pretty sure they are pretty solid on identifying their numbers up to 100, I explained to them that they can figure out numbers all the way to 1000 now, since putting a 1 in front of 86 makes it... (and Iggy says " One hundred and eighty six!") Let's be tricky and make it a 2 in front of 86... (and Iggy says "Two hundred and eighty six!") and then I look over and Ooky has taken his dry erase board off the wall and is writing number and after number after number. Where the heck did all this come from??

Games Galore

Today we played a plethera of games, both in the flesh and online. Here were some we conquered today:

Monopoly Jr: Went well, Iggy explained to his brother that you didn't need to have a four dollar bill to pay the banker four dollars, but that you could use two two-dollar bills. He was completely amazed to learn that you could also use a one-dollar bill and a three-dollar bill to make up the four dollar fine. I took this opportunity to explain to the boys that there is no such thing as a three- or four-dollar bill. Oh, yes, and the game we bought was used and when we opened it we realized there wasn't enough "money" in it to even play the game, so we had to make more money to play. Which turned into a fair amount of practice writing those pesky numbers. Who knew?

12 and Back: A great game we learned one day at a local homeschool store. All it takes are three dice, a piece of paper with 1-12 written on it, and a few place markers. (In our case, a button, a miniature dog, and a miniature owl. Guess who was the lame button?)The rules of the game: Player rolls 3 dice and adds them in any grouping of the 1, 2 or 3 dice to make the numbers 1-12. Beginning with #1, the player moves his marker up the board in sequence as he is able to "make" each number. A player may make as many numbers as is possible with each roll and moving accordingly. Which means that when you roll and 1, 2 and 3, you can not only move past the 1, 2 and 3 on the board, but you can also move to 4 (1+3), the 5 (2+3) and the 6 (3+2+1). And the coolest thing is when the kids GET THAT!!

Lego.com: Imagine this, but there are some tough logic games on that site! We got hung up on Junkbot Undercover...which is a game where you basically have to use a certain amount of Legos to get Junkbot from one side of the screen to the other. The upper levels are actually pretty hard!

http://www.vocabulary.co.il/games2/hangman/hman.php : A cool site where they have a hangman game (actually Hangmouse) that has a ton of different topics and words for the kids to figure out. They get seven chances to guess letters, but if they get a letter that's actually in the word, the "chance" doesn't count. I kept telling them "start with vowels!!!" and to my delight, they knew what they were.

Wheel of Fortuneish Thing: : This is something I started on a dry erase board awhile back, but haven't done it for awhile. (I think the game died about the time roofing started...) I think of three or four bigger words that the boys use a lot, but probably have no clue how to spell, and I write them on the dry erase board with some letters missing. Then sometime over the course of the day and pondering, we figure out what the word is (whether it is from sounding out what's there and guessing what the whole word is, or getting clues for what the word is from me, and then having to figure out what letters are missing). Today's big words were transformer, unicorns, and bloodhound.



Sidenote: Iggy wanted to know why, in the word bloodhound, does the double o not make the sound as in boo. I said "Great question, never even noticed that before." Then later, when he again volunteered to read the bedtime story, and came across the word to, asked "why does that make the oo sound if it only has one o?" "Good question," said his mother. He said English makes no sense. Well, thought I, at least you figured that out early.

9/11 = Transformers?

So...continuing on the September 11th thing, I basically gave my kids two books to look at (I'd ordered them a long time ago and they are full of tons of pictures, nothing too graphic in my opinion) and just said we can look at these and if you have questions, we can talk about it. Iggy mostly was just interested in 1. why someone would want to fly a plane into a building if they knew they were going to die, and 2. who in the world could hate America, like who exactly are the bad guys? Now you might think this is totally weird, but the only way I could think to explain anything remotely close to the whole September 11th thing was to delve into the boys' world of Transformers. Then, oddly enough, there were a lot of things they "understood"...as far as good guys/bad guys goes. Then the day morphed into us writing a Transformers story, and them each making a book from it and illustrating it. (They turned out really neat, actually.) And there you have it. The September 11th disaster in a kindergarten-like world.

Today, our learning took us to issues like "Mom, why doesn't this frog we found have any legs?" to "Maybe instead of reading this book, Mom, you could sing it." (Um, what?) We played badminton, went goose "hunting" (which basically meant the boys sat in the backyard with a lunchbox full of snacks and the "duck boats" they made a few days ago and made a lot of noise), and also spent some time explaining to Ooky why swinging a three foot long metal pipe at various fixed objects could be dangerous to anyone within eye or earshot. (We have yet to figure out where he found the pipe. In all "fairness" to the child, he was being Optimus Prime and it was his ax. I told him I didn't think OP had an ax, but what do I know?) We harvested all the carrots from our garden, made four loaves of bread and some chili, helped Grandpa haul things to the burn pile...man, I'm exhausted just typing it all down. As far as anything actually academic...Ooky told me that if I wanted to spell "cube" (this was during another Transformers spazz out) that it would be spelled "Q" and "B"...which I suppose, if the English launguage made any sense at all, would be correct.

The evening ended with another rousing game of Slamwich, and I was again told I was the best mom ever. (Wow, if that's all it takes...)I love doing games with the kids. I enjoy the time with them, and there are so many billions of things you can learn from games besides the rules of how to play. Any favorites that you gals like to play with your darlings?

Book Addicts Anonymous...

Today was a great day at the library. I think we checked out 47 books. We also got a good look at the homeschoolers of the area. Walked inside in the middle of the day and thought "Aha! There you are fellow homeschoolers! You can't hide now!" (Insert devious maniacal laughter.) The librarian and another mom got into a great No-Child-Left-Behind discussion that I would have loved to have joined in on. Alas, I was distracted by the half a million books being brought to me accompanied by "Mom, we HAVE to get this one..." How can you turn down the kids bringing you books?? Ok, so there has to be some line, I guess, and ours is very easily drawn by "When the crate is full, its time to go." Let me tell you, that crate was REALLY full. Do you know how much 47 books weigh?

We really do read a lot of books...and lots of different kinds. Everything from the simplest reader books (Iggy mostly) to chapter (with pictures) books like Magic Treehouse and Captain Underpants. Today we read a whole book on the origins of Halloween...why? Because it looked cool, and you know if you try to get that library book at Halloween time it will be at someone else's house lost under their couch. So we read it today. Because they wanted to. I learned a lot. I love Halloween (mostly because I love fall, but anyway) and have never understood the newish anti-Halloween thing that goes on. And (gasp) I even go to church.

As far as reading/writing curriculum, I guess we don't have one. We play a lot of games: A to Z (both with the board and without) Boggle Jr., Scrabble Jr., rhyming games, making up stories and books. The book "Games for Reading" by Peggy Kaye is wicked awesome and has also brought a lot of cool homemade type reading "games" to our school shelf.

I absolutely adore books. They rock my world.