Elections and Veteran's Day, moons and music

I believe in involving my children in the democratic process so Genevieve and Tobias joined me in walking to our local polling station and casting our ballots.  We read several books to better understand the role of the President and elections.  Lillian's Right to Vote follows an older African American woman as she walks to vote, thinking of all the challenges she and her ancestors faced to get to this point.  The Day Gogo Went to Vote tells of a grandmother in South Africa voting for the first time.  My Teacher for President shares a boy's reasons that his teacher would make a great president.  We read other stories of American History as well.  Mr. Lincoln's Whiskers retells one of my favorite stories about the young girl who wrote to Abraham Lincoln and convinced him to grow a beard.  We Came to America is a wonderful poem of the different people that have shaped our country.  We also watched the Daniel Tiger about voting. The Neighborhood Votes, where they talk about finding the positive even if the thing you voted for did not win.

For Veteran's Day, we read While You Are Away and painted flowers using liquid watercolors and coffee filters.  We wrapped green pipe cleaners around the dried coffee filters to finish our flower.

Since I have been playing piano for Music Makers class, I bought a fun kids keyboard to practice on and for them to enjoy.  B. Meowsic Keyboard functions as a small piano keyboard, but also allows kids to change the instrument sound, plays a background beat, includes a microphone and recording function and plays some prerecorded songs.  The only really annoying function is that one of the instruments is meowing.

At storytime, we read books themed around the moon so we read some more at home.  Kitten's First Full Moon follows a kitten who thinks the moon is a bowl of milk it just can't quite reach.  National Geographic had a non-fiction book about the moon.  Eric Carle also wrote a fun story about a father trying to reach the moon and how the moon changes shape, Papa Please Get the Moon for Me.  We cut out circles in black and orange.  We cut a crescent out of one of the orange circles and taped the orange shapes on the black.  We had a full black circle, an orange crescent on black, an orange D-shaped moon on black, and a full orange circle.  We taped two circles on a straw and the two others on a second straw to create moon phases.

We continued reading some Thanksgiving books.  An Outlaw Thanksgiving tells the story of a young girl and her mother travelling across country.  The young girl sees a wanted poster for Butch Cassidy, and when their train gets stuck in the snow they end up celebrating Thanksgiving with the outlaw.  Thanksgiving Counting uses the numbers 1-6 in a simple book discussing Thanksgiving.  Thanksgiving on Plymouth Plantation is for older readers, but follows two time-travelling kids and their grandmother to the first Thanksgiving.