Weekly book shelf, 5/21

Here's some of what Calvin was reading by himself this week:.

Jon and I read a number of picture books with Calvin this week, too. Bird, Butterfly, Eel is one of our favorites. It's a year-in-the-life story of the eponymous animals, following their life and travels from their summer homes in New England to their winter homes, in three different locations, and back. It's an endearing story, completely devoid of anthropomorphism, accompanied by beautiful illustrations. Calvin loves it.

And we finished Glinda of Oz, but are still reading our way through the Aeneid.

On my bookshelf this week... in fiction I just finished Shogun, by James Clavell. My copy of Beasts in the Garden arrived so that's my new non-fiction, but I haven't picked my next fiction yet.

Ancient Rome—clay face pots

Okay, ours weren't clay. When Calvin brought me the book that he'd been reading about ancient Rome and said that he wanted to make "these face pots" all we had in the house was playdough, both homemade and store bought, so that's what we used. It's a matter of making it up as we go along, isn't it?

Clay face pots have been found mostly in British Roman ruins and are believed to have had a religious purpose. Many have been found with ashes in them. That's about all I can tell you about them right now, except that Calvin found them interesting and wanted to give them a try.

Obviously play dough was not the best choice for this, and we'll probably give this another try in the future with real honest-to-goodness clay, but the upside to starting with play dough was getting to do it over, and over, and over again by squishing and rebuilding, squishing and rebuilding.

The big pot was made with mostly homemade play dough, which wasn't as firm and didn't keep its shape as well, plus it was the first. The smaller, more colorful pot was the last pot made, after much practice, and is one we made together. I rolled all the blue and I made the mouth while Calvin assembled and did all the other rolling and mashing and shaping.

I think they were both adorable, and now they're both blobs of dough again waiting to be remade or made into something else.

Weekly book shelf, 5/6

Like many families we have a read-before-bed tradition. Usually that's when Calvin and I read another chapter, or two or three, in our most recent read aloud, these days that's usually an Oz. But we have a morning book tradition in our family, too. Since Calvin usually gets up in the mornings before Jon and I are (fully) awake, he selects a handful of picture books and brings them into our room to sit either in the sunshine on the floor or on top of us in bed and read to himself while we slowly blink the day into focus. The books then remain in our bed or on our floor until that night when I set them on the dresser. I have a stack of at least fifteen books still on my dresser from this week because I've been too busy to put them back, but also because sometimes he'll revisit one of them on a morning, and because I like to see the stack grow over the course of the week.

That's just a little reading anecdote, and whatever books he read in the mornings this week are still upstairs on my dresser, so here are the books I know he read downstairs this week. Earl the earthworm is a cute little story with lots of information about worms and their ecosystem. We both continue to be a fan of the Magic Tree House series, he's started on a Rome kick, and he also continued to devour Nate the Great in such quantities as our library had.

He read these two out loud to me this week while I worked in the garden. The first, Jip and Janneke, was a gift sent to him by my cousin who lives in the Netherlands. I wish this book was available here so that I could recommend it to everyone. It's adorable, and he's had a great time with it since it arrived on Tuesday. And he read two chapters to me from that perennial favorite, the original Winnie the Pooh, sans Disney influence.

We've used these for our exploration of Ancient Rome, and yes, I realize I've mixed my Greek and Roman myths here with the appearance of Theseus, but since we started with the Aeneid he at least understands how they intersect, and some of our other research books even explain the lineup of Greek and Roman gods.

We are almost done with Glinda of Oz, but not quite.

And on my bookshelf this week... in fiction I finished A Man Without A Country, by Kurt Vonnegut, and Brave New World, by Aldous Huxley, and am now reading Delta of venus. In non-fiction I'm almost finished with The Monk in the Garden, by Robin Marantz Henig, but it's a tad tedious so I'm still plugging away at it.