This week is ParaNorman. I love doing this movie during this month. It’s just a little bit scary, but everything turns out alright in the end. It’s also a brilliant example of stop-motion, which is what our activities last week and this week are building up to.
Singing, listening to different pieces, learning piano, learning guitar
Crochet
The project he is working on (currently he is making himself a poncho)
Basic Information
We talk about the days of the week and play games with the cutouts of the names. We do the same thing with the names of the months of the year. You can find the print-outs here.
Printing words
Download material
Counting objects/math-type activities
Practice counting objects and writing how many of each type –(in download material)
Storytime
Activity
Film script in stop-motion (2 days: taking the pictures + putting them together on computer, find music to go with it) Make a shoebox diorama (web instructions)
On Saturday of Ottawa ComicCon, we met the ninth Doctor himself, Christopher Eccleston! (I wish Pegasus had been with us, but Saturday was too long a day for him.)
I was too flustered to come up with anything to say, so we just told him that our kids had watched his episodes and loved them.
This was a brand-new movie. The French was very fast. I’m not sure I’d recommend it for the future, but Pegasus says he understood everything. He also took out toys immediately following the movie and had them re-enact most of the movie, so I’m guessing that he understood most of it.
Dance
I haven’t been doing much formally for this one. I’ll put music on and he’ll dance to it unprompted. (repeated from last week)
Music
He has been diligent about practising his scales and doing the exercise from the book. He also says out loud what the scale letters are as he plays them. My mom noticed that he’s been popping his elbows out, so he’s actively trying to keep them tucked.
Crochet
I helped him do several blocks of stitches… probably about 4 inches.
Basic Information
We alternated between listening to videos for the days of the week and months of the year (M, W, F), and attempting to put them in order with the pieces of paper (days on Tuesday, months on Thursday). He sang along unprompted. The days of the week song that we’ve been listening to has BEEN REMOVED and I don’t know who made it so we can’t look it up with the wayback machine! Pegasus is very upset about this (as am I). I’ve reached out to Dragon’s Kindergarten teacher in hopes that she has the link, but I haven’t heard back yet.
Printing words
He has been improving slowly. I like that I don’t have to fight him to get him to do it. He is very pleased with himself for completing them, and usually writes more words than I ask him to do (I split them up over a couple days because he was overwhelmed that first week).
Counting objects/math-type activities
I tried to let him count on his own this week, and he got very angry and didn’t want to do it. It’s frustrating when he’s used to doing it one way and doesn’t want to change things up.
Storytime
We got new mini French books on Monday. I am getting him to read the small words that he knows, like ‘le’ and ‘la’, and I’m trying to get him to read the bigger words that show up multiple times in the same book.
Activity
Draw a monster mask (web templates) – Dragon used this one, Pegasus used this one I had forgotten that Dragon hadn’t cut very close to the line when she did this activity, and was surprised when Pegasus did the same thing. (I didn’t know it was the same thing until a few days later.) He really didn’t want to cut the paper close to the tabs (for threading the yarn that would tie his mask to his head), and kept resisting finishing his mask until he came up with the suggestion of cutting the tabs off entirely and putting the mask on a popsicle stick. I am very impressed with his problem solving.
Spooky handprint – do NOT use construction paper for this activity! It doesn’t work! Regular printer paper works perfectly, and both kids enjoyed making their handprint and then painting over it.
construction paper did not work!on paper (Pegasus on left, Dragon on right)dry!starting to painta hand appears!he spilled on the side of his paper. makes for a cool image!
Cheesecloth ghosts – VERY messy, definitely take the advice of putting down a plastic bag/sheet! (at least it’s just glue and water, but still…it gets everywhere. Also, I suggest you have two people to do the laying of the cheesecloth over the balloon, because it’s really hard to do with only one pair of hands. It also requires two layers of cheesecloth, and needs to dry overnight, so don’t forget to account for that!
Glue!!balloonscheeseclothglue and water – ewdryingneeds another layerdoing a second layerpopping the balloonthe shell is done!looooong smilesmirky ghostPegasus’s on left, mine on right
Rebellious teens ignore all the rules and get everything they want. Splinter is worried about their safety (rightly so, have you met humanity?) but eventually realizes that he’s being overbearing.
There’s a giant whale mutant chimera in there too.
It very much feels like an 80’s plot with 2020’s slang.
Score: 0.5
Characters
The turtles are extremely authentically teenage boys. My sister-in-law, a teacher, looked a little shell-shocked (pun intended). The antics, limited forward thinking and overthinking had me getting flashbacks to being a teen.
April was great, despite the lazy puke jokes, and I really liked having her be the same age as the turtles.
Score: 1
Dialogue
This dialogue will feel dated by the end of the year. There’s more slang than you can shake a ninja star at.
The penchant for the turtles to all talk at the same time is both relatable and well done, although exhausting to follow. The teasing and quipping felt natural and hilarious. The villain was over-the-top but it worked.
April’s smarts and snark were awesome.
Score: 0.5
Visuals and Music
The style of animation felt very dark. The backgrounds were gorgeous and the characters great, but it was a lot of dark on dark on dark.
The music was good and did it’s job, but was nothing special.
Score: 0.5
Fun
The movie was interesting and fun, but went from pure pessimism to ridiculous optimism way too quick near the end. It felt like the writers wrote themselves into a corner and decided to just do a big battle.
The 4yo loved it and the 7yo liked it but not a lot.
The rest of the family enjoyed it, but we were all tired by the end.
Score: 0.5
Overall
An excellent TMNT movie with lots of action and for the first time the turtles felt like actual teens. April was a standout character and making her a teen was a brilliant idea. That said, the last act of the movie felt forced and the colour palate was a little too dark.
This week is Kiki’s Delivery Service, the 1989 film by Studio Ghibli. Although the movie itself isn’t set during Halloween, she is still a witch, and I wanted to include more of the Ghibli movies in the roster. Only two activities this week because of Thanksgiving and we’ve got Can*Con on the Friday.
Singing, listening to different pieces, learning piano, learning guitar
Crochet
The project he is working on (currently he is making himself a poncho)
Basic Information
We talk about the days of the week and play games with the cutouts of the names. We do the same thing with the names of the months of the year. You can find the print-outs here.
Printing words
Download material
Counting objects/math-type activities
Practice counting objects and writing how many of each type –(in download material)
Storytime
Activity
Plot and write a short Halloween script Finish script and make background props
Moana is a favourite in our house, so he’s very familiar with both the dialogue and the story. He says he understood a lot of it, but I’m not sure how much he’s remembering.
Dance
I haven’t been doing much formally for this one. I’ll put music on and he’ll dance to it unprompted. (repeated from last week)
Music
This week, he was given an exercise from the first piano book. He is ridiculously excited about this. He is still practising the scale that he was taught as well.
Crochet
I helped him do several blocks of stitches… probably about 6 inches. He’s excited to be able to wear it, but there’s still so much left to do. In this vein, I have asked his permission to work on it when he’s not there, so that it actually gets completed before the end of the year. The first stripe is complete.
Basic Information
We alternated between listening to videos for the days of the week and months of the year (M, W, F), and attempting to put them in order with the pieces of paper (days on Tuesday, months on Thursday). He sang along unprompted.
Printing words
He has been improving slowly. I like that I don’t have to fight him to get him to do it. He is very pleased with himself for completing them, and usually writes more words than I ask him to do (I split them up over a couple days because he was overwhelmed that first week).
Counting objects/math-type activities
I tried a different method of helping him count, by having him write the number in each box. This won’t work every time, but he seemed to like it this week.
Storytime
We read the mini French books during the week. I am getting him to read the small words that he knows, like ‘le’ and ‘la’. He is very proud of himself for reading them.
Activity
Objects floating in water experiment – I had forgotten just how many skills this experiment teaches; cutting with scissors, forming a hypothesis, and then writing down the results. He did a great job cutting, he had no trouble formulating the hypotheses (although I’m not sure that he thought very hard about it), and then remembered what the results were in order to mark them down on the paper. He was a little upset that he got so many of them wrong, but I told him that experiments are more often about getting the wrong answer and then explaining why. That helped.
HypothesesResults (checked or x’d, depending on the experiment)
Star gazing – We learned about the planets (he is very enthusiastic about telling everyone that there are four gas giants in the solar system) and he coloured them in (sort of) to make a book. (He cut the pages using my paper cutter because it is SO MUCH FASTER than using scissors.) We chose to use the telescope on Saturday (the benefits of not being constrained to school hours). We went out to the park nearby our house because the moon was too low to look at from our house. We tried to find Saturn, and managed it, but when we tried to magnify, we lost sight of it. Pegasus and Dragon were both very excited to see the moon through the telescope, but they were very bored of how long it took to fiddle with it in order to see the moon properly.
Bake with coconut – He didn’t want to get his hands dirty, but we talked about fractions in cups, and he was very excited about the idea nad seemed to catch on at the end that a quarter cup would fit twice into a half cup and two half cups would fit twice into a whole cup. He really enjoys dumping things and measuring things, but not so much touching things with his hands, so he did a lot of the chocolate dunking with a fork and it worked well.
Wet hair and change of clothes after a sugar mishap!
How do you write an urban fantasy if your main protagonist has no idea that he lives in a magical world? How do you let the readers who are introduced to the Aetherverse in Crushing It know that there even is a magical world, if your protagonist is unaware that it exists?
I had to figure out the answers to these questions once I realized that this book was, well, a book.
I decided to bookend the main content with a secondary point of view; that of Carter, the love interest. He grew up in the magical community and knows almost everything there is to know about it.
In the prologue, he and Kennedy are talking about the imminent arrival of her brother, who Jason wants to keep in the dark regarding the magical community. It’s Jason’s perogative; as the soon to be brother-in-law, he wants to get a feel for Tommy’s character before introducing life-changing information.
Then the interlude shows Carter’s anxiety over keeping such a big secret from Tommy. Will he be upset once he finds out? He won’t be told until the wedding, which doesn’t happen in this book!
Finally, the epilogue is a letter from Carter to Tommy counting down the days until the wedding. His excitement over finally getting to tell the secret is obvious.
The novellette at the end of the book, also from Carter’s POV, starts to really show his strengths and skills… and mistakes.
One of the benefits of leaving the main character out of the loop regarding the magical community: in book 2, I can introduce it to both the readers and the character at once. Not only does this happen in book 2 of Lucky in Love, but the explanation is in book 2 of The Gates of Westmeath as well as a nice little recap! Win-win, in my book! (Pun intended)
I don’t want to spoil too many surprises now, in the hopes that book 2 will be published in the future, but if you want to sneak a peek at what our magical world looks like (and you want to keep it in the Young Adult category), check out Éric’s Baker City Mysteries series! Book 4 came out this year!
