Someone asked me how I afterschool—so here comes. Because Nicco already spends plenty of time in school, I don’t do any workbooks or seatwork with him. I don’t want to bore him to tears and run the risk of burning him out. Instead, we curl up on the sofa with a bunch of good books.

But wait, afterschooling is a bit different from plain old reading. I sneakily choose books to fit a loose curriculum which I draw up every month. So, for example, because we are celebrating Thanksgiving this month, the ‘curriculum’ touches upon America, its discovery (with stories about Thorvald the Viking, Christopher Columbus and Amerigo Vespucci), the arrival of the pilgrims (with a couple of stories on the first Thanksgiving) and the meaning of giving thanks and being grateful about what we have (with a bunch of moral tales).

After I read aloud the story, we look up places on our inflatable globe, watch the odd video clip on Youtube if there are any relevant ones, and most of all talk about what happened—what would you have done in Columbus’ place when his crew lost hope, for example, or were the children right or wrong in climbing on the barn’s roof in the Visit. Sometimes we play games that are linked to the book, sometimes Nicco tries to read some of the book’s words, and often we end up cooking something we read about.

That’s the essence of it, with the odd bit of counting, addition and subtraction thrown in (Nicco loves questions like: “If you have seven and I give you three more, how many do you have?” He also loves asking me questions, usually about numbes that, for him, are enormous: “If you have fifty and I give you a hundred, how many do you have?”). Oh, and we craft—drawing, painting, mucking about with play dough or clay…we do it all.

Of course, when I see he just wants to play, I back off from afterschooling. But he really loves reading and we tend to go through at least one story every afternoon. I bet he doesn’t even realise it is some form of schooling…

We must be the only non-American family to celebrate Thanksgiving this side of the pond. This is partly because we are partial to holidays and like to celebrate as many as we can, and partly to honour Manfredi’s American relatives (I am thinking of you, Georgeann).

So we are busy getting ready for it. The food is there (in my mind, that is—the actual cooking will be a two-day job between Wednesday and Thursday) and the decorations are coming along nicely, especially now that Niccolo got involved. We made a Thanksgiving tree and shaped a horn of plenty out of DAS paste (when I say shaped, I mean sort of shaped—the horn got given some extraordinary ridges which make it look like a stegosaurus with no head).

The horn got painted today, and Nicco was adamant he wanted it to be blue, red and yellow. I could show him pictures of brown horns till the cows came home—he still wanted it multicolour, and in random patches please. Our mutant horn is drying now, and should be ready to be filled tomorrow with chestnuts, walnuts, pomegranades and grenadillas (not quite the traditional thing, I know, but they are a lovely shade of orange).

We’ll finger paint some turkeys next and turn them into place cards. I was hoping to find some more ideas in Five in a Row’s Thanksgiving ebook, which I downloaded today, but they had a Thanksgiving tree and a bread cornucopia, both of which we have sort of done.  Shame (although there are a couple of yummy recipes in there too, so I didn’t completely waste $6).

We are also reading up a lot on Thanksgiving, now that Niccolo is old enough to understand and enjoy what the celebration is all about. I have found loads of old, copyright-free stories to enjoy. Favourites so far are: The First Thanksgiving Day (from Wiggin and Smith’s Story Hour), The Visit (from Lindsay’s More Mother Stories) and The Spirit of the Corn (from Jenkins Oldcott’s Good Stories for Great Holidays).

Tonight we’ll start on Louisa May Alcott’s An Old Fashioned Thanksgiving. It’s long, and Nicco is probably too young for it, but we’ll see if Alcott works her literary magic on him.

P.S.: the Christmas kit is coming along nicely. I am looking for a decent e-sales solution now, and hopefully will be in business soon!

There is a woman out there who is my parenting hero. She is the friend of a friend—and the proud mother of four-year-old triplets and a two-year-old boy. If you ever chance upon her blog, you’ll soon discover that she has more energy and does more stuff with her four preschoolers than I can ever hope to accomplish with my single three-and-a-half-year-old boy.

Paper egg painted with salt drip

When I feel shattered in the evening—which, let’s face it, happens pretty much every day—I wonder how she does it. Oh, and she also finds the time to scour the Internet for crafty projects to do with her kids. The good news for me is that she shares her findings on her blog. Through her, I discovered The Learning Box Preschool programme and, lately, Preschool Express—a great resource for seasonal children’s crafts. I found a couple of really good Easter ideas there, which Niccolo and I immediately set out to try.

My favourite was painting paper eggs. Jean Warren, the woman behind Preschool Express, suggests painting them with a mix of tempera and cornstarch for a porcelain-like finish. But I suffer from a deep-set inability to follow instructions without making changes, so I decided to use salt drip instead. Nicco and I had already used it to decorate Valentine’s hearts and it gives the paper a lovely raised, rough texture.

So I made the salt drip (1 cup of flour, 1/3 cup of salt, food colouring and enough water to reach a dripping consistency) and we painted away. The end result made Nicco “really proud”—his words, not mine.