Medieval Bad Girls (and Chickens) Week continues in our Summer Reading Series…. Today, the “chickens” come into play…I read the kids a small bit of Chaucer’s Middle English as well as Peter Ackroyd’s prose treatment of Chaucer’s “Nun’s Priest’s Tale” from his Canterbury Tales: A Retelling. [We borrowed this one from the Toronto Public Library as […]
Blaise is going to spend most Tuesdays in the summer introducing the kids to Toronto’s neighbourhoods, or finding and exploring all of the city’s “hidden gems.” Before these travels begin, however, they spent a day “mapping” both the city of Toronto and our Upper Beaches neighbourhood, newly dubbed “Beach Hill.” To get started, they looked […]
Today, I finished reading Beowulf aloud to the kids! Beowulf and his companions return home to their King. After several years of service to Hygelac and, then, Hygelac’s son (whose murder is depicted below), Beowulf himself became the ruler of the Geats. In his old age, Beowulf must do battle one more time. A poor […]
Today, we had a long train trip home from our trip to High Park, so I took the opportunity to have the kids both create and play story-telling games. They had their markers with them already. And, thinking ahead, I had brought along a big deck of blank white cardstock that I cut into small […]
Today, we took our reading and illustration project to the great outdoors. On a misty, “drippy” morning, we sat on a bench beneath a cluster of trees in Toronto’s High Park. There, I read the kids our second instalment of Beowulf: Just when things were settling down at Heorot, Grendel’s mother comes and attacks the […]
As part of our summer reading and writing project, I wanted the kids to understand what the terms Utopia and Dystopia meant. This led to a fun exercise that we’ll continue throughout the summer and, likely, into the fall… ILLUSTRATED DEFINITIONS What is an Illustrated Definition? A handsomely written word, a single, kid-friendly definition, and […]
“Don’t be led away by those howls about realism. Remember-pine woods are just as real as pigsties and a darn sight pleasanter to be in.” L.M. Montgomery, Emily of New Moon. Each year, the kids keep journals to document all of their Summer of Funner activities. We call these “Yesterday Books.” In the Summer of 2011, […]
School’s Out! Here’s our Summer of Funner 2013 Bucket List!! Make Newspaper Boats, Play Ping-Pong, Paint with Home-made Ice Paints, Play Candy Math, Discover Toronto’s Neighbourhoods, Read Tales of Mystery & Imagination, Go Bird-Watching, Make Pink Lemonade Jelly & AMAZING PINK LEMONADE CREAM BARS, Make and Use Tin Can Telephones, Decorate & Draw in our Yesterday Books, […]
