Theme Week: Dinosaurs

 This week we are learning all about dinosaurs! We are having tons of fun. How about you?

I am using First Encyclopedia of Dinosaurs and Prehistoric Life as our "textbook". I use the term loosely because it's a whole lot more fun and interesting than most textbooks I ever remember using in school. It provides a great framework and helps spark the interest of my little guy. The illustrations are beautiful and captivating while the text is simple and easy to follow.

My most favorite feature of this book (and many other Usborne books, I might add) is that it is "Internet-Linked". This means that on each and every page you will find a little icon and a blurb explaining various enrichment activities you will find if you go to Usborne's designated webpage. For example, here is the page about early sea creatures:

I circled the "Internet Link" box for easy viewing. It reads, "For a link to a website where you can watch video clips of prehistoric sharks, go to..." If you go to the provided link this is what you see:

So just from this one page you watch various videos and animations, look at photos of rare "prehistoric sharks", print pictures to color, and make a model of a trilobite. Pretty cool, huh? If your child was really into sea creatures you could literally spend an entire afternoon looking up these different links, thereby expanding your child's knowledge, interest, and passion on the subject. Just awesome. There are nearly 60 pages in First Encyclopedia of Dinosaurs and Prehistoric Life that each contain a link to a page like this for further enrichment.

We'll be working our way through this book this week and we hope you'll join us for more dinosaur fun!

For more info on Usborne Quicklinks go here.

Last Day!

Today is the last day to get the starter kit for $69. This thing is valued at over $350, so definitely a steal! Get it while you can (click on the 'Join' tab above) and let me know if you have any questions!

Dinosaur Week!

It's Dinosaur Week here at Books Everywhere! That means everyday we'll be learning about dinosaurs and doing special activities centered around our theme. We'll read about different kinds of dinosaurs, make our own dinosaurs from paper and paint, and even make our own jurassic volcano erupt. Stay tuned for more fun activities!

Here is a list of books we will be using this week:

- Dinosaur Fun for art

- First Encyclopedia of Dinosaurs - great for history, geography, and science; includes lots of illustrations and simple text as well as lots of free internet links to do more activities online

- 'Foaming Monster' experiment from 50 Science Things to Make and Do - we will make a volcano instead of a monster
- How Big is a Million? for math

- There are tons of other fun dinosaur books that we won't have time to use this week, but you can look them up here if you want to get a dinosaur sticker book, learn how to draw dinosaurs, or gift a dinosaur board book to your little one!

Literacy

Here is a simple video about the difference you can make as you share books with the children in your life and then enable others to do the same with the children in theirs. Enjoy!

Dinosaur Fun

 Who doesn't want to have fun with dinosaurs? Seriously. The book Dinosaur Fun is an easy-to-follow activity book for preschoolers that shows them how to create their very own dinosaurs step-by-step using materials that are easy to find. It is a hard back book with heavy, sturdy pages. Instructions are provided for making 11 different dinos - practically an entire ecosystem. Grab it for yourself. You'll be happy you did the next you're stuck inside with your four-year-old! Oh yeah, in addition to being great fun, the activities will help to develop important skills such as hand control, coordination and concentration.

Dinosaur Fun

Here are some pictures of my little man getting smarter by making dinosaurs out of paper and paint:

Baby's Very First Noisy Book: Farm

This is a brand new title for Fall 2013! This book is perfect for your little one. The pictures are bright and vibrant, yet simple. My favorite feature of this book is that the sounds it makes are soothing and soft, not loud and startling like many noisy books are. This noisy farm book is a solid board book with big tabs so your baby can easily turn the pages. Perfect for your baby or as a baby shower gift for a friend!

Baby's Very First Noisy Book: Farm

Other books in this series include: Baby's Very First Noisy Book, Baby's Very First Noisy Book: Christmas, Baby's Very First Noisy Book: Nursery Rhymes

*Thanks to Michele over at ThisCrazyBookLady for this review!

The Best College Prep Course

I LOVE this story about a young man in 2002 who scored a perfect 36 on the A.C.T. If you want your kids to succeed be sure to read to them starting from birth! This story was taken from Jim Trelease's Read-Aloud Handbook, a must-read for all parents and educators:

"We start with the family of Susan and Tad Williams and sons, Christopher and David. Of the four hundred thousand students taking the A.C.T. exam with Christopher back in 2002, only fifty-seven had perfect scores—he was the fifty-eighth. When word got out that this kid from Russell, Kentucky (population 3,645), had scored a perfect 36, the family was besieged with questions, the most common being "What prep course did he take? Kaplan? Princeton Review?" It turned out to be a course his parents enrolled him as an infant, a free program, unlike some of the private plans that now cost up to $250 an hour.

"In responding to inquiries about Christopher's prep courses, the Williamses simply told people—including the New York Times— that he hadn't taken any, that he did no prep work. That, of course, wasn't completely true. His mother and father had been giving him and his younger brother free prep classes all through their childhoods, from infancy into adolescence: they read to them for thirty minutes a night, year after year, even after they learned how to read for themselves.

"The best S.A.T. prep course is to read to your children when they're little."

"Theirs was a home brimming with books but no TV Guide, GameCube, or Hooked on Phonics. Even though Susan Williams was a fourth-generation teacher, she offered no home instruction in reading before the boys reached school age. She and Tad just read to them—sowed (and sewed) the sounds and syllables and endings and blendings of language into the love of books. Each boy easily learned to read, loved it, gobbled it up voraciously. Besides being a family bonding agent, reading aloud was used not as test prep as much as an "ensurance" policy—it ensured the boys would be ready for whatever came their way in school. That, combined with church and Scouting, would ensure they were ready for whatever life threw at them.

"By 2011, David was a University of Louisville graduate working as an engineer and Christopher was pursuing his PhD in biochemistry at Duke. Sometimes Christopher's early reading experiences surface even in the biochemistry department, like the day after a Duke basketball loss and he remarked to his lunch mates, "I guess 'there's no joy in Mudville' today." None of the other grad students grasped the reference to Ernest Thayer's classic sports poem."


Inspired by this awesome story? Grab some news books for your kiddos and start reading to them TONIGHT!