Book of the Week

This summer, you may have followed along as Cruz and I imparted on a quest to learn his rainbow by declaring each week a specific 'Color of the Week.' We explored red and green and blue and orange and yellow, and while I'm quite convinced it helped with his colors, it also put our creative energy to good use during the summer season.  I filled a discovery box each week with objects and treasures that matched our color of the week.  We cooked things like red popsicles and orange peel cookies and blue jello, and did lots of neat crafts that continue to hang and add color to various rooms in our house.  I loved color week and have big plans to throw in some letters-of-the-week next summer.

Notice the 'summer' theme here?  I am blessed with a job that allows me more time at home during the summer months, which means more time to devote to fun projects and adventures with Cruz.  And while we're blessed with a daycare center that provides so many wonderful learning opportunities for my son throughout the school year (they walk in lines, let me tell you!), I do miss throwing together these little bouts of curriculum for Cruz and I to work on together.

So this weekend, I decided to start something new.  Instead of an entire week devoted to a color, with crafts and foods and adventures to go with it, I'm starting a book-of-the-week project.  One book, or a series of books, that become our focus of learning for the week, with one or two activities to go with it.  Since Cruz loves his books perhaps more than anything else, this should be easy for me to integrate and will push me to make a habit of introducing him to crafts, creation, and construction.  It's simple, it's easy to throw together with the supplies I've accumulated over the months, and it provides a break from the redundancy that seems to inch our way into our house during the cold winter months.

This week, we took a closer look at one of Cruz's favorite series, How Do Dinosaurs... by Jane Yolen.  These books, especially his favorite, How Do Dinosaurs Play with Their Friends, are one of a handful of books that Cruz will choose to read every day if he had the choice.  We read the book, talked about dinosaurs, sharing, and the letter 'D', and did some painting with green dinosaur paint.  Afterwards, we combined pieces of Cruz's painted masterpiece with some green construction paper to put together a 'D' shaped dinosaur.

 

         
Dad even got in on the painting adventure, devising his own dinosaur/godzilla creature.  I think it's rad.