Memory Monday :: Halloween

I am revisiting past Halloweens for the first Memory Monday.  I hope you will enjoy these few photos.  

2005: We had some kind of lizard (or was it a dragon?), and two unicorns!

Sick Pumpkin 2008

Cannibal Pumpkin 2008

2009: We had a corpse bride, a witch, and Harry Potter!
Orion had a black halloween shirt on, but he wasn't too impressed.
He did enjoy all the walking though!

Happy Halloween!

Happy Halloween!

We had another great Halloween here, a bit chilly and windy, but still a lot of fun! This year, we all went out together trick-or-treating.
This year, we had Celeste as a witch with a slightly green face, Andre as Harry Potter, and Adrienne as a corpse bride. I like to go along with them and dress up a little, this year I did a quick skeleton face..
We hope everyone had a great Happy Halloween!

Book Sharing Monday :: Troll's-Eye View

Troll's-Eye View: A Book of Villainous Tales is a collection of stories written by fifteen different authors. You will find short stories about the villains in fairy tales like the Giant's Wife from "Jack and the Beanstalk" and Rumpelstiltskin. The editors explain in that they love the "old fairy tales, which were dark, scary, magical, suspensful, and thrilling, full of cruel stepmothers, malicious fairies, and flesh-eating orgres and giants."

We love that type at our house !

Each short story is followed by a page which gives you a tiny bit of information on the author, and also about the story you just read, why the author chose it and where the fairy tale came from originaly.

Some of the authors found in this collection are Jane Yolen, Garth Nix, Neil Gaiman, Holly Black, and Peter S. Beagle.

"There's an Evil Wizard living in Dahoe, Main. It says so, on the sign hanging outside his shop:

Evil Wizard Books, Z. Smallbone, Prop.

His shop is also his house, which looks just like an Evil Wizard's house ought to look."

With Halloween next Sunday, I found this book to have perfect timing! I also wanted to share a link that has lot of great information on Halloween, sorted by categories: peoples and groups (Druids, Celts), Themes (History of the Jack O' Lantern, Ghost Stories, Pumpkin Facts), Events (Halloween Around the World), all from History.com: Halloween.  

If you are participating in Book Sharing Monday, please add your link to Mr. Linky below. Thank you and Happy Reading!
 

Book Sharing Monday :: One Halloween Night

We have been enjoying many Halloween themed picture books for the last few weeks. You can see some in my librarything widget right below the main blog header.

This morning I asked Celeste to choose her latest favourite to share with you.

One Halloween Night is written and illustrated by Mark Teague. He is the illustrator for those wonderful How Do Dinosaurs... books.

This picture book has great artwork and the story is a lot of fun too.

Three kids are looking forward to Halloween, but this halloween seems to be a little different for them. Their costumes aren't really what they had planned,  the candy is different and the evening just keeps on getting more strange.

A fun Halloween story!

"At other houses, the treats were weird, or awful. Soon their bags were full of candy with names like "Broccoli Chews," "Sweet'n'Sauerkraut",  and "Eggplant Fizzlers." 

 

Year 5 :: Week 9 Home Learning Report

In world geography, we are now learning about South America. We read books on Columbia, Brazil, and Argentina. While searching for interesting books for our geography at the library, I cam across this series by Bobbie Kalman. I have used her history books before, but these were new to us. There are full of photos from the countries and are perfect for our studies. I don't always read the entire book, but we always look at all the photos and talk about those.

In Canadian History, we read about Montcalm and Wolfe in the Plains of Abraham battle. We  watched the related episode from Canada: A People's History. We learned more about the colonists, the people who came from Europe to this new world. Andre and Adrienne researched what kind of food the Habitants ate and what the Voyageurs would have eaten as well.








In Science, we covered motion this week. Every week, while I am reading the Usborne Science Encyclopedia, I have encouraged Andre and Adrienne to take notes. We have done narration for years but note taking was new to them. They are both getting better every week.

In Art/Music Appreciation, we started a new artist, Vermeer. I thought it would be fun to read aloud Chasing Vermeer by Blue Balliett.
We have really enjoyed this book so far, with the puzzles to solve. There are some free resources at Scholastic for this book, including printable pentominoes. While completing our biography notebook page and looking at various paintings by Vermeer, we found out that The Concert (see below) was stolen in 1990 from the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston. You can watch the account from the Director of Security on Youtube here.

We had another nice week of homeschooling, getting our main subjects (LA and Math) done and having fun as well. We even did some French!

With Halloween coming soon, Celeste and I have been decorating a bit and doing some simple crafts. We like the dancing skeleton and paper banners in particular, from the Toy Maker site. They remind us of our Mexico study! 

It was a happy halloween!

No rain + lots of candy = a happy halloween!

Book Sharing Monday

A special Halloween Book Sharing Monday! We have read a few books related to Halloween and most are listed below the main blog title. I am sharing one of Celeste's favourite. It's a counting book and she "reads" that one to herself several times every day!

"10 Trick-or-Treaters: A Halloween Counting Book" written by Janet Schulman and illustrated by Linda Davick. The trick-or-treaters are scared away one by one. Celeste really enjoys counting down and also counting all the candies at the last page.

"3 trick-or-treaters - why are there so few? A vampire crooned, "Good evening"...

and then tere were 2."

Wordless Wednesday (almost)..

This is a countdown calendar I printed from Family Fun. It is filled with activities to do while counting down to October 31.

I added Halloween links below the main title of this blog, under "seasonal links", below the books. There are many different links, some just plain fun like carving a virtual pumpkin, others a bit more educational.

Update on our pumpkins!

Not sure how the pics will turn out tonight, so here are two during the day. The puking one is complete now, and the cute little one "Eek"...

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A few pictures from tonight. It was such a great Halloween. The weather was perfect, the kids got lots of candy, and we even found a great haunted house right in our neighborhood!

Pumpkin carving for Halloween!

We carved our pumpkins tonight. I had mentioned before here that we wanted to do a couple of the ideas from extremepumpkins.com. The kids decided that we would try the Cannibal pumpkin and the Puking pumpkin! Everyone had a job tonight...kids cleaned up the inside of the pumpkins, I drew the designs on them, and Dad carved. We all had a great time!
I added a picture at the end that Fairy took tonight, of Princess and me. A couple of weeks ago, I stumbled on a couple of blogs that mentioned how Moms are rarely in the pictures, and how our children end up with just a few rare photos of us. I am always the one behind the camera, mostly because I do enjoy taking pictures! But, I thought it was true that having me in the picture is quite rare, so I am making an effort now...I guess you might "see me" more often now :)

Happy Halloween!

An early start on Halloween!

We went to 2 different places today and got an early start on Halloween! First was a stop at a local park where they had some fun games, second was at a shopping plaza where many stores and businesses organized a special trick-or-treat time. The kids could go inside the store, as long as there was a sign in the window, and trick or treat! They received quite a bit of candy, and even one salon had a special little treat bag for moms... This was a great start for all of us!