Second Breakfast

Last Friday was the 75th Anniversary of The Hobbit.  Kyla's classroom is reading it now and decided to join in the big celebration by having second breakfast at school.

I guess I should have taken that photo before the bread basket (which was really full of hard boiled eggs) was empties by a bunch of hungry 6th grade hobbits.

Dr. Suess, the CFO and eggs

Oooh, this sounds like some kind of weird sci-fi movie, but I'm just catching you up on the girls' school activities.  Last week they celebrated Dr. Seuss' Birthday with a Fox in Socks theme.  I discovered that I don't own any interesting or crazy socks, but luckily the kids do.

The 5th grade has been studying eggs and little sister also wanted to have a "baby" egg.  We even made her a skirt.  

They had to build something for an egg to be dropped of the roof of the school.  Parachutes really help and the egg survived.

This week Kevin and I got to help the 5th graders on their field trip to JA Biztown.  The kids get to run the businesses and Kyla was the CFO of the town newspaper,

 which meant a lot of desk work.  

This year she made it to the Animal Shelter after her second paycheck and adopted a puppy before they were all gone.  

You Capture - Vibrance

Wednesday, March 30


Well it's kind of hard to find vibrance in this dreary grey Oregon weather.  Even though you can't see it on her face, Sydney was vibrant about finishing her first chapter book.  Here she is reading in bed,  starting her second book.  

Here are some vibrant colors in a board game.  

 and Kyla peeking out of the playhouse, which she barely fits in.  

She is also feeling pretty vibrant about turning 10 today.  Happy Birthday Kyla!!
I can't believe I've been a mom for a whole decade.  


Click here for more Vibrance photos.

Happy Birthday Dr. Suess

Tuesday, March 2

Did you know that it's the Cat in the Hat's 50th Birthday?  Today, hubby and I went to school with the girls to help celebrate Dr. Suess' Birthday.  I was going to say we took turns reading to our kids, but actually the girls read to us while we had Starbucks and doughnuts.  Maybe I'll have a party like that (I'm not really a cake person).

I love all the art that the kids make and display.

I love our school!

Getting SMART

Wednesday, October 28

Wow, I'm really getting behind on the blog these days. With both girls in school all day ('til 2:15) I was supposed to have all this free time to get caught up, work out, blog and keep up with all the normal household chores. If I haven't been doing any of that, what have I been doing?

Well let's see. There was soccer. A lot of soccer. I think our last practice is today and we have about 3 games for each girl left. Sometimes I feel like I never get anything done. I just get started and then it's time to stop and get ready for something else. I have totally lost my ability to be efficient at getting things done at home. . . or maybe I never had it!

The other big thing I have been doing is volunteering at the girls' school. I try to help out in kindergarten every week, especially when they have their writing workshop time. But my new job (no I'm not getting paid) is coordinating the SMART (Start Making a Reader Today) program at the school. Thank goodness I'm not doing it alone, because it really feels like a part time job. I'm a co-coordinator with my friend and fellow parent Ann. We go way back (about 5 years ago) to when we were both on the board at the co-op preschool. It the first time for both of us and I don't think we realized what we were getting into. Don't read this next part Ann, but between the two of us we have worked 80 hours in the last two months. We had to go to weekly training in September and scheduling with teachers and volunteers just takes time. We've been up and running for two weeks now and things are going well. I'm looking forward to when it will only take about 4-5 hours a week.

If you don't know about SMART, let me try to sum it up. It's a non-profit volunteer organization in Oregon, that provides selected K-3 students one hour/week of reading time with a volunteer from the community. The kids also get to take home and keep 2 new books per month. This is their 19th year and this year they are trying to serve 9,078 students! It's a really great program and already I can see how much the volunteers and kids enjoy it. It's great to see kids get excited about books and reading.

During the month of November, SMART will receive donations from Safeway checkout stands. So if you are asked to round up or donate to support children's literacy, you could help support SMART!

Thanks for reading this almost no photo post. I leave you with a random picture I took at the University of Portland a few weeks ago. The weather is getting colder, but flowers are still blooming.

Take a break from school and learn to read!

Monday, October 12

Last Friday the girls didn't have school, so I took them to the library. I was specifically searching for beginning reader books for Sydney because I new she was just about to start reading. Then this little red book, with no picture on the cover caught my eye.

Inside were 12 tiny books with simple pictures, one sentence per page and all the words were one syllable all short vowel sounds. Jackpot!
In the car she immediately started sounding out words. After a couple pages she shouted, "Mom, I'm reading, I'm really reading!" Music to my ears! Kyla helped her for a while at home.

Aaaaaannnnnd....

it took her two days, but she read the whole book all by herself. She is sooo proud! Now we joke about how she used to read "the" like "tuh-hau-eh". That was so funny and it was only two days ago. What's even better is that was level 2 and I've reserved the rest of the sets (5 in all).

If you have any emergent readers in your future I highly recommend the Bob Books. After just now checking out their web site it turns out they were developed right here in Portland, OR. Nice! I'm looking forward to some quiet winter evenings with the whole family reading.

Read to the Dogs

Tuesday, October 6

First, I have to start off by saying that we have the best public library ever, Multnomah County Library in Oregon. It's really true - they just won a National Medal for Museum and Library Service. My favorite thing is that you can search for and reserve a book online, then they just send you an email when it's time to pick it up at your neighborhood library. You can even recommend books for them to buy, and they do it. OK, enough about how great my library is. Well, just one more great thing is Read to the Dogs, a program that Kyla has always wanted to do, but we never remembered to sign up. We just happend to be there at the right time and she got a change to Read to the Dogs. Actually it's just one dog, named Sita. She is a therapy dog and kids sign up to come and read to her. If you know Kyla, you know she doesn't really need help with her reading. She spent most of her free indoor summer time reading. The girl loves to read. She also loves dogs, but hasn't spent much time with them. She also had a couple of bad dog experiences this summer and now is actually afraid of dogs, especially big ones. So this program is really helping her get comfortable with dogs again.

Doesn't Sita look happy!

So does Kyla.

Going local

Friday, June 6

I recently finished this book, the first non fiction work by Kingsolver, and it was great. I was very inspired. It was all about how her family lived off local food for a year. Here is a quote that really blows me away.

" If every US citizen ate just one meal per week of local & organically raised meats and produce, we would reduce our country's oil consumption by over 1.1 million barrels... of oil every week."

The day I finished the book I found out the Kyla's 2nd grade class would be taking a trip to a farm on Sauvie Island to learn how food gets to our table. I was so excited to share what I had learned in the book with her.

Well, it's taking me forever to get this posted. For some reason blogger wouldn't save my work, so now a week later I'm recomposing. It was a clear and sunny day, perfect field trip weather. From the bus, we could see all three mountains (St. Helens, Adams, and Hood). Here is Mt. St. Helens peeking through the trellis.

Kyla learned to listen like the owls and sneak like a fox (see her making the fox sign).

First stop was the compost pile, where we learned what dirt is made of - mostly worm and several other kind of bug's poo. At first the kids were grossed out, but then they started digging, holding worms and identifying bugs. There were also some veggies growing out of the compost pile, we tried some kale and arugula. The pic on the right show the lovely greens they were growing at the farm.

Next we headed out to learn the life cycle of plants and plant parts. We also identified some seeds. That was tough - don't think I've ever seen kale or turnip seeds. Here are the kids, walking down a row so they can plant some turnip seeds. They also tried some of those purple flowers on the right, chives. Oooh, a little too spicy.

After lunch, we went to a shady grove of pine trees and learned about the food chain and what kind of animals you find on the farm. We searched and found a lot of evidence that owls live on the farm. We also learned that owl pellets are not poop, it's vomit. Owls eat their prey whole and have to get rid of all the indigestibles. Here is the vole skull that we found.

It was a great field trip. Look for part 2 about going local in our own backyard later this week.