Seeing a book through a child's eye

Using Charlotte Mason in our school, we read a lot of books.  A LOT of books.  And with 4 little ones, I find that I read some of the same ones over and over and over again.  But sometimes I forget, that even though I have read a book a million times, at some point, one of my children get to experience a book for the very first time.

Recently, for Ainsley's beginning reading, I had her read Horton Hears a Who to me.  Now, I have read this book more times than I can remember, but when I asked Ainsley to pull this book off the book shelf, she had no idea what book I was talking about.  I finally walked over and pulled the book off the shelf and showed her.  "This is Horton Hears a Who.  Remember?" I asked.  I was met with a blank look and a shake of the head. Turns out, she had never read this book.  She had never even pulled it off of the shelf and looked through the pictures.

So we sat down, curled together on the couch and she started to read to me.  We got to the part where Horton hears the voice for the first time, and Ainsley asks, "He's imagining that voice, right?"  I gave my signature smile and shrug which all my children know means, "I know the answer, and I'm not telling!"  The next few days of reading through this book brought back the magic of this book for me.  Ainsley was at the edge of her seat the entire time.  Were there really little who's down in Whoville on this speck of dust on a clover??  How could the jungle creatures be so mean, even if these Who's are imaginary!?  Are they really going to tie up Horton and cook all of Whoville in Bezzel-nut oil!?  Every time the timer would ring, and we would put aside Horton Hears a Who for the day, Ainsley would BEG for just a few more minutes.

I'm glad that she never had read this book before!  I'm glad she never even pulled it off of the shelf to look at the pictures.  Having her be a bit older, and experience this story for the first time was priceless, and I think I shall never tire of this book again!

Finding fun with Stop Motion Animation

We had a great 2 weeks with things getting back to normal finally!  We did our normal school work - math, spelling, science - you know, the required stuff.  But sometime during our 2 weeks of returning to normal, my Lord of the Ring obsessed and Lego loving boys discovered the magic of stop-motion animation.

They started off with Legos.  They would spend all their free time building sets together, and would make little skits for the Lego figures to carry out.  They would record it all on my camera, one photo at a time.  Then they would play it back on my camera by holding down the right button.  After they had done a few videos like this, I showed them how to put it on the computer and make it into a movie on Windows Movie Maker.  Here is what they came up with:

After making the video of Frodo disappearing with the Ring, Nathaniel made mention that he wished that there was really a ring that could make you disappear.  After that, Nathaniel and Ephraim disappeared for the day.  When I called Ephraim and Nathaniel down for dinner, they couldn't WAIT to show me what they had been working on.  They had applied what they had learned about Lego stop motion animation and made a stop motion animation scene of them using a ring to disappear.

I'm very proud of the creativity and initiative they took to learn this skill!  And they've had a TON of fun learning how to do this!