Raspberries

It's been perfect weather for the backyard gardener. Rain in the evening, clearing throughout the day, sunny and cool, or even almost warm, in the afternoon when it's finally time to get out into the garden. I've been gradually preparing the garden for spring planting. This week, I tidied the raspberries: Pruned, thinned, weeded, mulched. The photo was taken about halfway through the process. Here's a clear, concise, step-by-step article on how to prune rapsberries: Time to Tame the Raspberry Jungle.

Three days ago, I was digging up and whacking away at bare sticks. Today many of the larger canes had tight reddish buds with green leaf tips peeking through. Spring has sprung.

Wordless Wednesday: Spring(ish)

Color Study:Shades

You Need:
White paper (we folded our papers in half lengthwise to create narrow strips)
White paint, black paint and one other paint color of your choice
Paintbrushes
Paint tray, old yogurt cups or lids, or something similar for paint mixing
Newspaper
A rag or two in case of spills

Prepare your area by setting down newspapers, setting out your materials, and choosing your paint colors and brushes.

Read Color(Step-By-Step Science) by Robert Snedden and Sabrina Crewe. This is the best kids' book on the science of color that we've found so far. It's got thorough and colorful explanations of different aspects of color, and several color-related activities and experiments, including step-by step directions for making a shade chart.

Squirt two big squirts of your chosen color paint onto your mixing tray.

In the middle of your paper, paint a stripe of your chosen color.

Squeeze a drop or two of white paint into one of your squirts of color, and mix thoroughly. What happens to your color? Paint a stripe of that color onto your paper, to the left of your original color. Mix in a few more drops of white paint. Paint another stripe to the left. Continue mixing in a few more drops of white and painting new stripes until you reach the left edge of your paper.

Now try the same thing in the other squirt of your original color, this time with the black paint. Be careful to start with only one drop of black! Black can quickly overpower your original color, so it's better to start with one drop each time, then add another if you need to. Paint a stripe of that color onto your paper, this time to the right of your original color. Continue mixing in a drop or two of black and painting new stripes of color until you reach the right edge of your paper.


Set aside your shade chart to dry. Try another color! Or make another shade chart by mixing your color with its complementary color (the color opposite your color on the color wheel) instead of using black or white. What happens? What happens if you mix your color with a color adjacent to it on the color wheel?
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Color Wheel and Color Mixing at Enchanted Learning

Lesson Plan: Tints, Tones and Shades

Memory Poem

All Things Bright and Beautiful
~Cecil Frances Alexander

All things bright and beautiful,
All creatures great and small,
All things wise and wonderful,
The Lord God made them all.



Each little flower that opens,
Each little bird that sings,
He made their glowing colors,
He made their tiny wings.

The purple-headed mountain,
The river running by,
The sunset, and the morning,
That brightens up the sky;

The cold wind in the winter,
The pleasant summer sun,
The ripe fruits in the garden,
He made them every one.


He gave us eyes to see them,
And lips that we might tell,
How great is God Almighty,
Who has made all things well.



Printable version of All Things Bright and Beautiful at storyit.com Classic Children's Poetry

Sun Bread

Sun Bread, Elisa Kleven.

Sun Bread is a lovely story about a baker who tempts the sun back to her cold and dreary village by baking a delicious warm loaf of bread shaped like the sun. It's a charming story, and Kleven's illustrations make the book a delight to read. A sun bread recipe is included at the end of the book, making story time transition naturally and delightfully into the kitchen, especially on a dreary winter day.

Every once in a while, the fine young gents just fall in love with a book. Elisa Kleven is one of our favorite author-illustrators, ever since we chanced upon The Lion and the Little Red Bird. As a matter of fact, I was looking for The Lion and the Little Red Bird as a fun accompaniment to our color studies. It wasn't on the library shelf, nor was another Poohsticks favorite, The Paper Princess. (Poohsticks review of both The Lion and the Little Red Bird and The Paper Princess here.) But Sun Bread was on the shelf, so I checked it out instead. The fine young gents have been reading and re-reading it ever since.

Today I found Sun Bread at Robert's Bookshop, so I bought it. The gents were delighted when I walked in the door with an armful of books, and even more delighted to find a special favorite to keep on our shelves.

Read more about Elisa Kleven, her picture books, and her art at her lovely website: www.elisakleven.com. There's even a link to a delicious recipe for sun bread!

Science and Art: Color Lesson

Read Color, Ruth Heller. There's a clear and colorful explanation of printing using four colors: Yellow, cyan, magenta and black. Or find another simple explanation to read (like this one, The Science of Light: Made from Dots).


Dotty Dots: You need a pencil, a piece of white paper, a yellow marker, a red marker, and a blue marker (preferably a cyan blue rather than a royal blue). Draw three circles with a gray pencil on the white piece of paper. In one circle, use the red and blue marker tips to make red dots and blue dots, as close together as you can get without overlapping. In another circle, do the same with the blue and the yellow markers, and use red and yellow dots to fill in the third circle. Look at the circles close up--can you see the separate colors? Now ask another person to hold up your paper as you look at it from across the room. Can you still see separate dots of different colors, or do they blend to look like one color?

Colors under the microscope: Look at a variety of pictures--photographs, postcards, books--with a magnifying glass and under the microscope. Do you see tiny dots used to make the rainbow of colors? Now look at a part of a printed photo or postcard that looks white. What do you see under the microscope?

The Side Show (detail), Georges Seurat

Bonus Lesson: Read about Georges Seurat. His art was influenced by the science of color. Look closely at his pictures, and you'll see that they're composed of tiny dots of pure color.

Wordless Wednesday: Color wheel

Tuesday Ten: What We're Reading

I'm Reading:

Growing Vegetables West of the Cascades: The Complete Guide to Organic Gardening, Steve Solomon.

It's garden season. Last week I got out and started digging up my garden boxes. It's time to plant peas, and soon I'll be planting spinach and potatoes. Growing Vegetables West of the Cascades is my new garden bible because it's written specifically for this wet temperate region. In other vegetable news, I called the Food for Lane County Youth Farm to sign up for a CSA box again this year. I can't wait!

Knowing and Teaching Elementary Mathematics: Teachers' Understanding of Fundamental Mathematics in China and the United States (Studies in Mathematical Thinking and Learning.), Liping Ma.

"Mathematical knowledge is based on both convention and logic. However, convention...serves as a shelter for those who don't have a conceptual understanding of a mathematical procedure." (p. 31) Knowing and Teaching Elementary Mathematics was mentioned on a homeschool message board, and it's not available at our library, so I bought it. So far it's fascinating. This book is worth a separate post of its own. I hope to get to that soon.

A Collection of Math Lessons, Grades 1-3 (Math Solutions Series), Marilyn Burns and Bonnie Tank.

A Collection of Math Lessons showed up while I was looking on Amazon.com for the Liping Ma book, and this book is available from the library. It's got hands-on activties designed to stimulate mathematical creativity and problem-solving. The fine young gents and I have done the first math lesson, math necklaces, and it was great fun all around. Also worthy of a separate post.

Read-Alouds:

Mary Poppins, P. L. Travers.

I finished Mary Poppins last night. We were all a little sad. The fine young gents were charmed by the Banks children and their magical adventures with Mary. Second-grade gent's favorite chapter was the visit to the zoo, kindergarten gent still asks questions about Michael's bad day, and preschool gent wants me to re-read the visit to Uncle Wigg who went rolling and bobbing about the ceiling. As for me, well, I found myself delightedly exclaiming as I started each new chapter, "Oh, this is one of my favorite chapters in any book, ever!"

The Magic Pocket: Selected Poems, Michio Mado, Anno Mitsumasa, and Empress Michiko.

The Magic Pocket is lovely Japanese poems translated into English. The orginal Japanese is printed on the facing page. The elder lovely lady is teaching her brothers Japanese, so I keep my eye out for library books that they might enjoy. She's been reading some of these lovely poems in English to the fine young gents, and in Japanese to herself, delighted that she can read them in their orginal versions.

The fine young gents are reading:

Wag a Tail, Lois Ehlert.
Lois Ehlert is a favorite of the fine young gents. Our youngest gent has had this on the shelf by his bed for a couple weeks now, and he's fascinated by the dogs and their adventures.



Planting a Rainbow, Lois Ehlert.
Gardening and colors. A perfect companion to our soon-to-be-spring studies. The illustrations, of a garden planted in a rainbow of flowers, are bold and simple, beautiful and accurate.

Is It Red? Is It Yellow? Is It Blue?, Tana Hoban.
There are no words in this book, just color circles at the bottom of each page of the brightly colored photos of a city. I checked this out from the library to go with our color studies, and the fine young gents keep pulling it off the shelf and poring over the pictures. It's bright, colorful and engaging, perfect for all ages.

Divide and Ride (MathStart 3), Stuart J. Murphy and George Ulrich.

These MathStart books are a fun way to introduce and reinforce math concepts. One of the gents chose this book at the library, and it's been floating around the house ever since. With no prompting from me, I might add. They've got fine math minds and they think it's fun. I still scratch my head about that one. How is it that my children love math? Actually, I don't scratch my head, I think I know why. But that's another post too.

Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, J. K. Rowling.

Second-grade gent has decided he's ready to tackle number four. He read the second and third books in the Harry Potter series last year, then decided to take a break because they were getting scary and longer. Two weeks ago, he mentioned that he might like to read The Goblet of Fire, so I made him a deal: Not only will he get to watch the movie after he reads the book, I'll read the fifth book as a read-aloud once he's finished the fourth. Last week we had a Potter-a-thon and watched the first three movies, and yesterday he started Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire. He's already captivated.

Photo Challenge

I've been tagged by Valerie (whom I have the pleasure of having met in real life) at Insane Parents Unite! Open your pictures folder. Open your sixth folder of pictures, choose the sixth picture and write something about it. Then tag six blogs. (Here's Valerie's sixth photo.)

And here's mine:


It's Levi, mixing paint in a dish. We made prints on paper. This picture is even in the linked post. Not very exciting.

So I counted six folders from the bottom, to last year's folder, then took the sixth photo from the sixth folder of 2008:

Snow in the back yard trees. In this rainy, fairly temperate climate, waking up to snow is like waking up to find that it's Christmas, except snow is a surprise. The whole neighborhood looks like a new place, and everything here shuts down so it's quiet and still. I wrote a post about this snow, and the above picture is in that post. Hmm. Looks like you're not getting a new picture today after all. But it's still lovely to revisit that day.

Now I have to tag six people. This is a simple one, ladies, so please play with me!
Cristy at Just Me
Megan at Irie's Fascinating Life
Nina at Painted Rainbows
Dawn at Follow Me
Elizabeth at News from the Desert (Or East Coast or some other state!)
Laura at Two Pilots and a Princess
And you!

Midnight Musings: Barf!

The fine young gents have been reading Calvin and Hobbes. Six-year-old gent is particularly fascinated by "not my brother, the other one" Calvin's antics, and recounts the strips with gusto. His favorite these past two days is Calvin barfing in the middle of the night. Which led me to ponder in the middle of the night....

When did we outgrow the word "barf"?

BARF!

It sounds just like what it is. A loud, round, rough word, a vivid verb, the epitome of onomatopoeia. Instead we use the pale and sickly "vomit" or the bland "threw up" or "puke"--such a wimpy word.

From now on, I'm going to say "barf." Barf, barf, barf.

(And then, finally, I fell asleep. I need to stop drinking caffeinated tea before bed.)

Today, I'll be saying "epitome of onomatopoeia" all day long. Try it! It's delicious.