Spring Days and Little Animal Photo Books

 

Ah, spring is finally here after a long, very cold winter. Today we walked by the park, which was overflowing with kids in the early afternoon. I remarked, "The kids must have been let out early from school today." Ella replies, "Oh, do you think they let them out early because it's such a nice day?!" I tried to explain that schools don't get out for nice days, which she thought was pretty unbelievable considering how often homeschool gets out for nice days. I've been trying to shake myself out of the traditional school calendar this year because, frankly, July is no time to be on vacation in New England. I will gladly stay inside, out of the humidity and do our work then. Now spring and Fall, those are New England's months. Maybe I should reschedule the whole year so that any days between 65 and 75 degrees, we are off, and all other days we school. I am pretty certain that we would still make the required 180 days of school here.

But since we have been trying to tuck some school in here between admiring croci, and listen to the toddler pound on the door and yell "Outside! Outside!", we have been enjoying this collection of books about little animals we found at Costco. A Big Treasury of Little Animals by Phoebe Dunn has six books about kids and their pet animals.  The stories are told in photographs instead of art. So since we often try to imitate the art of the books we are reading, we made our own little animal  photo books.

 

Each of the girls chose a main character for their story from their toys. Ella chose a Burmese Mountain Dog puppy. Mabel chose a piglet. Trixie used her bunny family. Then they thought of several scenes that would tell a story. They set them up and we took the pictures. Since Ella's story was a lot longer and more complicated, I will share part of Mabel's book here.

 I was surprised by how much they got the concept of setting up scenes and moving the action forward. In Mabel's story, a little orphan piglet is adopted and given a home.

 

I especially liked the way that both girls used different sized figures in the same scene to show that the animal was growing up.

 

When the pig was all grown-up, she met a boy pig, and they had a little piglet of their own.

After we had taken all the pictures, I loaded them on to our computer, and copied them into a Word document. Then the kids narrated their stories looking at the photos, and I typed it under the pictures. They were so thrilled to show Brent their books and he was quite impressed. Mabel said that making books with your toys was sooooo much better than drawing pictures. She wants to always make books like this.