Skip to main content

March Titles // 2017


This month's reading was a bit anticlimactic after last month's reads, and it was surprising, too, since I had a two week break from homeschooling, which mean playdates! every! day! for the kids. Somehow, even without our regular classes, responsibilities, and routines, I read nothing. Nada. All these were finished before the middle of March. Egads, it feels like a waste now that I write that out!Ah, well, such is life sometimes. I finished a book club book, a blogger's book, and a great YA pick. See which one was which below:

*The Break by Katherena Vermette - This book was recently defended on CBC's Canada Reads, only to get voted off in the first round. It's the first book by Vermette and it was really good. It's a look inside a broken Native family tree, with resilient characters, tales of past hurts, and future hopes or despair, depending on who tells the story. Similar to the novel Homegoing, it jumps from different viewpoints, but keeps the same 4 or 5 voices throughout, until the end. I really enjoyed this book, though at times has some graphic and tragic parts, and I look forward to what Vermette writes in the future. 

*Chasing Slow by Erin Loechner - This book has been all over blog-land and even popped up in a few magazines I read, so I decided to give it a try. The book has a very modern design and that should have been my first flag-I don't always like things that have too much hype around them. This book will surely hit a lot of homeruns with people, but it wasn't one for me. I couldn't overly tell if this was a 'pretty' book (see: styling) with a buzz phrase attached, a memoir, or a how-to. Or maybe it's all of those things? I didn't know the author beforehand (she had an HGTV show awhile back) but it just wasn't my thing. It's a quick read, but not the right time. 

*One Crazy Summer by Rita Williams-Garcia - This is a YA novel, perhaps even middle-grade, set in the 1970s in California, where 3 sisters who visit their estranged mother spend their days not bothering her, but instead going to a Black Panther summer camp. It was a great read, and I'd happily read it to my kids if we  study that time period when they're between 9-13 years of age. I enjoyed the humor, the detailed description of the culture in California at the time, and the gentle handling of divorce and abandonment by a parent. This book has won numerous awards and I can see why. I just found out there are two sequels, so I'll be putting those on my booklist, too. 


Read Aloud with the Kids

*Sophie Mouse: The Great Big Paw Print (#9) by Poppy Green - The newest sweet 'saga' in the Sophie Mouse series, I read this to the kids in maybe a day (2 sittings). They are easy, the illustrations are so cute, and the stories are always a bit mysterious with a happy ending. Nothing much else to report here other than if you have a child who doesn't like super scary plot lines, but you're wanting solid-friendship-type books, these are a great and easy read. 

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

How To: DIY Sand/Water Table

How To: Build A Sand/Water Table for Under $30!
Sorry this took me so long to blog, but I had to have a tool list and full instructions before I could do so.
A little history on my love for the sand/water table. I love the idea behind tools for tiny hands, i.e. the Montessori Method, and like to have Lukka 'figure things out for himself', even when he is playing. I try to have the most simple and basic toys available for 3 reasons: a) simple toys generally have less parts, which means less of a hassle for me
b) simple toys inspire way more creativity and imagination than do 'exact replica' toys
c) they are much more aesthetically pleasing to look at, therefore, not making every nook and cranny of our house an eyesore!
I know the last reason is just for me, but it's true. Plastic things don't generally last 1/2 as long as wooden or fabric toys, and they are unattractive. For this reason, I started to look for a wooden sand/water table as opposed to a plastic one …

Subscription Boxes as Homeschool Curriculum

Ani painting her first diarama
The subscription service business sector is exploding the online retail market. You can now buy toys, pet products, clothing, stationary, beauty products, eco-cleaning supplies, and even organic snacks all in monthly packages with excellent branding. While print magazines are slowly fading away, a new type of subscription purchasing is taking place in droves--for those who are too busy or depleted to run one more errand (hand raised here), you can get a fun surprise on your doorstep for a decent price. These are excellent as curriculum because all the work of planning and gathering has been done for you! Now it's just up to the child to execute and enjoy the process. 
I have tried a few subscription services as either birthday gifts or a trial run for homeschooling, and let me tell you there are some awesome businesses going up! I want to highlight a few of them for you that can be used as homeschooling curriculum for elementary grade kids. With each…

Snapshot Story of Malibu, Lake Louise Inlet, British Columbia

top photo: The Blainiacs; self-titled, our group from bible study

There are too many words to share everything about Malibu, so I'm going to share a few pictures, and some words in this post. Malibu is a Young Life camp that is it's own little village in the middle of nowhere, British Columbia, or at least it feels that way--very isolated. It's right at the top of Lake Louise Inlet (right before Lake Louise) but really, there is nothing out there. It is what a leader called "The Thin Place"; the place right in the middle of heaven and earth. It's beautiful, welcoming, joyful, and raw, pristine.


This lodge is where "Club" happens. This is where the large group of the 220+ women who were present for Women's Weekend  would get together twice daily for skits, singing, and hearing speakers before breaking out into small group time. The Women's Weekend follows the Young Life way in how they structure the retreat. Everything we did resembled what t…
http://ssmast.blogspot.com/2017/03/march-titles-2017.html
ssmast.blogspot.com
crawl=CC-MAIN-2017-26
143150
application/http; msgtype=response
sha1:RSZGLG4ZHWXMYEU5UQLID5476FU4TFJU
<urn:uuid:017720a7-5a6c-471a-ad12-11748c7b44b4>
2017-06-28T05:17:59Z
172.217.7.193
text/html
sha1:HTUS3I6SKBEHWS77VPEVETR3STEI6QCM
<urn:uuid:21150512-67bd-46c9-87da-76469ae7e4d3>
http://ssmast.blogspot.com/2017/03/march-titles-2017.html
response
<urn:uuid:9054f523-7158-4e47-9bdd-5612179fbfcf>
robots: classic
hostname: ip-10-145-172-11.ec2.internal
software: Nutch 1.6 (CC)
isPartOf: CC-MAIN-2017-26
operator: Common Crawl Admin
description: Wide crawl of the web for June 2017
publisher: Common Crawl
format: WARC File Format 1.0
conformsTo: http://bibnum.bnf.fr/WARC/WARC_ISO_28500_version1_latestdraft.pdf