Big review day

Jimmy actually *asked* to review a few things today. (He also asked for a math test, the little weirdo. LOL! But we didn't have one in today's lesson.) So we reviewed the A through L Bible memory verses. Jimmy remembered nearly every one perfectly except for the references. WTG, Jimmy! He also reviewed all of his letters, Aa-Ll. I asked if he wanted to copy letters or words, and he chose letters. Then I pulled out some phonics flash cards. We went over all of the cards up to L. Jimmy picked up most of them very quickly. They have pictures on the front to help describe the sound for each letter or letter combination, like a fish for F. Jimmy quickly realized that he could guess the sound by making the sounds of the pictures. We went over the different variations, like long & soft vowels, letter combinations (like ch), and the funky letters like c (could sound like s or k) and g (could sound like "guh" or like j).

For math, we did today's calendar work... and Jimmy got today's date completely correct! Today - a Thursday!!! Yay! Then we worked with linking cubes. The lesson number assumed we were in January (we're going through the lessons faster than the book intended), so we reviewed the pattern for December's calendar (red-green-green) and then introduced January's pattern (blue-blue-white-white). Jimmy got the concept very well, but we had to work on a little following-instructions issues. I think Jimmy was trying to show off to Daddy, who was in the room. After a correction by both me & Randy, Jimmy was much better about listening to what I actually was telling him to do.

Before reading The Clown of God, Jimmy & I discussed groups of objects. The main character of the story is a juggler, so I put 21 coins on the table & told Jimmy to pretend that they were eggplants that Giovanni could juggle. He had to tell me how many groups of 3 there could be. We worked on how to move the coins to be able to tell the most easily. Then I took away 1 coin (leaving 20) and asked him to do the same thing for groups of 2, 4, 10, and 5. He did very well.

We had a guest storytime reader today - Randy! Jimmy really liked that, but Randy learned just how squirmy Jimmy can be. =)

Our store

We had fun in math today. After our daily calendar work (which Jimmy aced), we played with pretend store items. Yesterday, as I posted, we labeled 10 cans of food with price tags of 1-10 cents. Today, we pretended to buy them. Jimmy was given 10 cents and had to decide what he could buy with that. He had a lot of fun and was disappointed when math was over.

We read Clown of God again today, this time discussing people in need. The juggler in the story was an orphan. We talked about how God enjoyed the juggler's talent, but how God also loves when we help people in need. The juggler used his talent to make people happy, and, in the same way, we can use our talents to help people in need. And that makes God happy. We talked about how we could help people with specific needs, like a classmate in Sunday School who is crying (see if they'd like to share the toy we're using) or someone who is hungry (give them food).

Jimmy wrote a lot during handwriting today. He wrote several L & l's (our LotW), and then copied lake, LAKE, caleb, CALEB, jade, JADE, half, HALF, fig, and FIG. He really liked the chance to practice his big letters as well as his little letters. He worked on his own, occasionally showing us letters that he was particularly proud of writing. We reviewed this week's memory verse as he worked.

Clown of God

Just a quick update before I jump into today's stuff: We finished last week with a math lesson & handwriting practice. Jimmy was very excited about handwriting, so he copied several words and even a few notes to people. (Shush, that's a secret for now!)

Today, we read our new FIAR book, The Clown of God by Tomie DePaola. It's a cute but sad story about an orphan boy who makes it in the world through his juggling talent. When that fails to sustain him in his old age, he returns back to the streets of his youth. He ends up in a church at Christmas, where the congregation brings Jesus their magnificent gifts. He has nothing to give from his poorness, but he remembers an encounter with monks during the height of his juggling fame. He dons his old costume & offers the Christ child his gift - his finest juggling. As he finishes his routine, he dies, but the originally sad-faced statue of Jesus is now smiling. Jimmy wondered at that, which really made me happy. We had a good chat about what gifts we can give God that will make Him happy. Hopefully, we'll be able to discuss this further tomorrow, when we take a closer look at orphans & other people in need. Today's "official" discussion was on reading comprehension. Early in the story, the boy juggles at a vegetable stand. Question - Why does he juggle there every day? Answer - Because the merchant feeds him soup when he is done. Question - Why does the merchant want the boy to juggle there? Answer - Because people buy vegetables while they are entertained by the juggling boy. A win-win situation! Jimmy remembered most of the answers, but he was a little fuzzy on the details. In the future, I think I should put reading comprehension discussions later in the week until he's able to read the book himself. Still, I think he did very well with this topic.

For math, we're continuing daily calendar work but Jimmy has really grasped the whole concept. I'm going to keep up daily calendar work as long as he's interested (he really loves pulling out "his" calendar), and especially as we're facing a very new month format - our first non-ber month - January. I am, however, planning to ad more look-ahead things. We've done Thanksgiving & Christmas, but I will add more everyday type things, like playdates, weekends with Grandma or Oma, etc.

Our math lesson today set up the next several lessons. We labeled 10 cans of food with made-up prices (ranged 1-10 cents). We put them in order from most expensive to least expensive. Jimmy was very disappointed when we put the cans away until the next lesson, so I had to tell him that we'll be pretending to buy the cans tomorrow.

Today's handwriting lesson was another big leap in Jimmy's progress. We read the Bible verse & associated story, but we jumped right into writing the LotW - L. But this time, instead of showing him how to write the letters, I wrote them on his notepad ahead of time. I also wrote words for him to copy (making sure to use all of the letters so far from A-L at least once). I gave him the pad to work on his own. He did a great job! The first few little a's were a little shaky, but we verbally reviewed how to write a little a, and his last few were perfect. He is really enjoying handwriting now, something I wasn't sure was going to happen for a good long time.

I declare today to be a good school day!

Jimmy's imagination

Today, we read My Blue Boat. Jimmy understood right away that the story was actually about a little girl pretending with her toy boat in the bathtub. After reading the book, we made up our own non-fiction-that-becomes-fiction story. We started describing our morning, and then we made up a silly little story about Jimmy falling off of something... up! He went to the moon, fell in the ocean, got run over by a boat, washed into a river, and traveled down a few waterfalls. The story ended by him crashing his head at the bottom of one of the waterfalls. *rolls eyes*

We started reviewing calendar work first thing in the morning. Randy asked him today's date as soon as Jimmy came to get us in the morning. He had trouble remembering Thursday, but Randy helped him repeat the days of the week. By the time we had our lessons, Jimmy remembered Thursday very easily. I'm going to keep drilling him on the days of the week. For our lesson, we introduced the demonstration clock. As I suspected, Jimmy was a little bored with this since he's been wearing & using his watch (thanks, Grandma!) for quite some time now. The book discusses both digital displays & conventional clocks, so Jimmy will definitely learn something new.

For LotW, Jimmy opted to write quite a bit this morning. He practiced K, k, J, & j, but also reviewed B, b, and D. He was a writing fanatic! I think he's almost ready to start copying words and short sentences. It's really amazing to see how much his confidence has grown. He really enjoys writing his letters now.

Happy Wednesday

We started by doing math. Jimmy did very well with his calendar work. We're going to have to work on what is the "month" and what is the "year" - he'll get them right, but only after guessing the day of the week and the date first. I think it's just his attention span. We've got lots of time to work on this, since we're doing calendar work for every math lesson, so I'm not worried. Today's lesson was using a pretend pocket (a drawing of a pocket on a piece of paper) & a pile of pennies to tell stories. We added pennies to the pocket & took some away, counting each time to find out how many pennies were still in the pocket. Jimmy declined the chance to tell his own story this morning. I think he was tired.

We read Yellow Ball next. Today, we talked about how the story was written in short, choppy phrases that were often only single words. I asked Jimmy to describe our living room that way. He would say something long-ish, and I would make it into a short, choppy phrase. Jimmy caught on right away, telling a very funny story about what Caleb was doing. Caleb, for his part, made sure to be very active so Jimmy had lots to tell. =)

We finished with LotW. We reviewed the J & K verses (the verses are down so we're just working on perfecting the references). The I wrote the sample J, j, K, and k's. Jimmy wrote his letters on his own. He chose to write them in this order: k, K, J, j. Not exactly sure why. All of his letters today got stars.

Interesting week - and it's only Tuesday

Yesterday, as we expected, Randy lost his job. So we're going to have family school for a while. It's going to be a little challenging to keep the boys focused on lessons when Daddy is home. Too bad he's so much fun! =)

This week, we're reading some of the Before FIAR books. I think I mentioned before that we have more weeks to do school than we had FIAR volume 1 books to row. ("Rowing" is reading a book for a period of time & doing educational activities based on the book.) This week's choices are Yellow Ball by Molly Bang and My Blue Boat by Chris L. Demarest. Yellow Ball ties into last week's Storm in the Night (which is good, since I'm trying to help Jimmy overcome fear; the storms in those books really help start the conversation), and My Blue Boat goes nicely with Yellow Ball since they are both books about being on the water.

Yesterday, we discussed fear again using the storm scenes in Yellow Ball. I pretended to be lightning (a wiggle of the fingers) and thunder (a loud "BOOM!"). Jimmy & I counted between the lightning & thunder. The storm came closer, was right over us, and then moved away from us. Jimmy had a lot of fun.

Today, we looked at the page in Yellow Ball where the moon is shining full above the calm ocean, where the yellow ball is gently riding the waves. I asked which was the moon & which was the ball, and then asked how we could tell the difference. We looked at this very same topic last year, but it was fun to see how much more advanced he is this year. Last year, he knew that the moon was the moon because it was in the sky. This year, he pointed out the slight differences in the color of the round objects (the ball had some yellow while the moon was only white). We looked at the moonbeam reflected on the water as well. He noticed a lot more clues this year & was able to articulate them very well.

Math lessons are going very well. Jimmy is getting extra calendar re-enforcement during Advent Calendar (with chocolates, of course) with Daddy at bedtime. Randy reviews what day it is (day of the week, month, date, and year), the "event" at the end of the countdown, and the real meaning of Christmas. They really enjoy this, and I can see their understanding grow during the countdown. Yesterday's math lesson was pennies in cups. I put out 11 cups - 1 with no pennies, 1 with 1 penny, 1 with 2 pennies, etc, until 1 with 10 pennies. Jimmy was given the number cards from 0-10 & asked to match the cups to their number cards. He got them all right, and he worked completely on his own (as in I was in the laundry room) for a good bit of it. Today's lesson was an evaluation. He had a little trouble with this test. The first part went very well - I held up a number card & asked him to show me that number in linking cubes. He passed each one. The second part involved me laying out linking cubes & Jimmy finding the matching number card. He didn't know that he could touch the cubes to count them, so he got 2 of the 3 wrong (he added one more than was there each time). When I told him that he could move them to count them, he got them all correct. When I re-read the teacher instructions, I realized that I probably should have had the cubes more directly in front of him instead of across the table. Mommy is learning here, too.

LotW is going very well this week. Since we didn't spend much time on the letter J last week, we're still reviewing it pretty heavily this week. Jimmy recited the J verse & practiced his J & j's yesterday before we got into K. We read the K verse & accompanying story. This week's verse is "Keep your tongue from evil." Psalm 34:13. Jimmy memorized the verse right away but still struggles with the reference. Today, we reviewed the J & K verses, practiced writing J & j, and introduced writing K & k. They look like easy letters, but it's tough to aim the middle of the sideways "V" to end up in the right place. Still, Jimmy's letters are all read-able. It's been a while since we had any major review of all of the previous letters, though, so I think we should look at doing that sometime over next week.

Computer troubles

My laptop's power cable died over Thanksgiving, so I haven't been able to do much internet stuff. But thanks to my awesome hubby, I'm back up & running! Love ya, babe!

So... I was able to grab some time to look over the math curriculum. I sifted through a couple of dozen lessons & noted which ones we'll skip. I'm keeping the lessons that introduce new concepts or review concepts that Jimmy didn't immediately master. I'm also planning on adding the occasional easy concept just to keep him fresh on those ideas. But for now, we'll stick with what we're doing & skip lessons as appropriate. Once we've finished the book, I'll check to see if we should jump into 1st grade math or just do the calendar work plus computer games for the remainder of our school year.

This week's FIAR book is Storm in the Night by Mary Stolz. It's a story about a grandfather & grandson who pass the time during a thunderstorm power outage. So far, we've discussed Jimmy's favorite parts of the book (a Before FIAR trick that I used for this book b/c it was a much longer book than we're used to reading), how to handle fear (both of real danger, reviewing Very Last First Time, and things we realize aren't dangerous... like Jimmy's fear of spiders that aren't really there), and how an author can use punctuation to help tell the story (italics for emphasis & quotation marks to show that someone is talking). Lots of major things this week. Jimmy especially had fun with the italics as we read the book today. We've seen italics before, in Night of the Moonjellies for the name of the boat Periwinkle. I guess I'm going a little italics-crazy in this post, too. LOL!

For math, we skipped a few lessons to get to some pattern work with linking cubes (kept it in b/c it used the December calendar's color pattern) and some matching number of pennies to a number card. Jimmy is still figuring out the concept of zero. He knows what zero means, but he is still placing the 0 card after 10 instead of before 1. I'm using the countdown method to help him remember - he knows that 0 follows 1 in a countdown. I haven't done math with him yet today (we had visitors this morning, which threw off our schedule), but I'm not worried since we're don't have anywhere near a tight timeline to complete the curriculum.

This week's LotW is J. Jimmy is excited for obvious reasons. He very nearly has the Bible verse memorized (Jesus said to them, "I am the way, the truth, and the life." John 14:6). He practiced writing big J and little j on Tuesday. He needs to smooth out his lines, but they were mostly readable letters. The dot over the little j has improved significantly since he wrote his i's. Jimmy gets very excited when we add a new letter post-it-note (a gift from Grandmom) to his bathroom mirror. I love how his face lights up as he thinks about his progress this year.

Since it is now Advent, I planned to change our music lessons to Christmas music. Well, both boys are going to be in our church's Christmas Program (a children's choir concert), and they were given CD's of the music they'll be singing. What a perfect fit! They beg to hear Pastor Jeff's CD. It's so much fun to hear them try to sing along. I'm nervous about the concert, tho... both of them tend to be hams. It's cute, of course, but I'm getting to be known as the mom of the scene stealers. Sigh.

TGIF

I'm going to make this quick (relatively speaking, that is) because I'm rushing to get done, get out of the house, and get the kids off to Grandma's. =)

We read Cranberry Thanksgiving, but I didn't have any follow up activited today. I pointed out the partial view picture (when Maggie peeks around a door), which we'll hopefully work on some time next week. I decided to do some light school next week (it was originally a week off from school in my calendar), so I'm loading up on crafts & music then.

For math, we did calendar work. We skipped yesterday, which was a shame because of the Thursday/twenty work, but I reviewed that with him today anyway. He's improving, but I should really avoid skipping Thursdays for a while. Might be tough next week...

I combined yesterday's scheduled math lesson with today's. I really wanted to get today's math lesson finished this week, since it was a test. So we quickly ran through yesterday's lesson - the introduction of "0." I wasn't sure how Jimmy would react, but he absorbed it very quickly. As the book warned, he initially tried to place the "0" after the "10." Once corrected, however, it was as if he's always known of 0. Then we moved on to the test. Let me tell you, it was a huge joke. Even Caleb passed the test with flying colors. I laid 4 shapes on the table - a rectange, a square, a circle, and a triangle. First, I pointed to each shape & asked what it was. Then I asked him to point to each shape as I named it. I know I sound like a broken record, but I really can't wait to adjust his math lessons to be more challenging.

We finished up with Bible verses (Jimmy has the verses & is working on the references), handwriting (I was a very picky reviewer, and those letters were good), and reading. Jimmy read he, his, has, her, hi, it, if, is, igloo, ice, and "if he has ice, it is an igloo" - I know it's a silly sentence, but it helped his confidence to have most of the words be what he had just read individually.

That's all for now! Time to get showered, load the car, and drive off into the sunset. (Ok, notsomuch the sunset part, but you get the idea...)

Check it out - new blog feature!

By popular demand (ok, by being asked by 2 people what something meant), I have added a glossary of terms. Look to the right side of the screen. You'll finally find out what I mean by FIAR and LotW. Enjoy!

The seasons

We skipped lessons yesterday because of a weird nap schedule. They didn't fall asleep until after 3:30, and didn't wake up until 7pm. Wouldn't have been so bad except that we used the morning to run errands. I had been planning on having lessons once Jimmy woke up from his nap, since he generally wakes up first. Oh well! Good thing we have time next week.

We read Cranberry Thanksgiving again. The boys really like it, especially the parts about Mr. Whiskers. Today's activity was to talk about the seasons. Jimmy named all four seasons (with a little prompting about summer... he got confused because fall can also be called autumn, so he named it twice, coming up with four seasons without summer). Then I asked him to tell me something special about each season. Fall - "The leaves fall off of the trees & they are all different colors." Winter - this is funny - "The rain falls out of the sky & becomes snow so all the little kids can go snowboarding." Summer - "It gets warm." I raised an eyebrow. "It gets soooo hot!" Spring - "The plants grow & grow & grow & grow!" I think he gets it.

Math went very well. He did another great calendar lesson. Tomorrow might be difficult because it is a changing of the 10's & it is a Thursday. But I asked him what tomorrow would be in both days of the week (he answered correctly with Thursday) and date (he also answered correctly with 20 after thinking for a moment). So maybe we'll be alright. I decided to skip two of the math activity lessons. They were both on shapes, which is well below Jimmy's level. These lessons were on triangles & squares. We had done similar lessons on rectangles & circles, which went well... but probably only because it was a fun game. I don't want to overdo it on the easy stuff or he'll get bored. I can't wait until I can look through the manual to modify things to Jimmy's level. Anyway, today's lesson was on numbers 1-10. While this is also below Jimmy, I felt there was enough game factor to keep him interested, plus tomorrow's lesson builds off of this & introduces 0. I'm not sure he understands 0 very well yet, so it will be a good lesson. We used numbers cards for 1-10. I laid them out randomly on the table & had him line them up in order. Then we played a game. First, he took one of the cards & hid it (mixing up the remaining cards). I had to guess which number was missing. Then I took a card & he had to guess. I took number 10, thinking it would be harder to guess since there wasn't an empty space when he lined them back up. He still got it!

We went over our Bible verses for this week. I had him repeat the verses after me 3 times. It's still funny to hear him try to pronounce "strengthens" but he's getting there. Then we started handwriting. I was very impressed! His H, h, I, and i's all looked very readable. He's going to have to work a little on making the H's not so wide and the dots of the i's a little more distinct than the lines, but he did very well. I decided that we won't be making up yesterday's handwriting lesson - we'll do a full review of all of the letters up to I instead.

I had been planning to do music as an additional lesson today, but Jimmy asked very nicely if we could read one of his level 1 readers. So Jimmy read (with a little help from me) Thomas Goes Fishing. He did pretty well, although it was obvious that he has memorized a bunch of it. (He read "funny" as "silly.") He still gets a little frustrated & doesn't want to sound out the words if he doesn't immediately know them. It's probably going to be a long process to get him to read, but I have a funny feeling that he'll be a voracious reader when that happens.

Thanksgiving

That's the word of the week - Thanksgiving. We're reading Cranberry Thanksgiving by Wende & Harry Devlin this week for FIAR. It's about a grandmother & granddaughter who try to invite one person each to Thanksgiving dinner - someone who is lonely or poor. The grandmother gets an unexpected lesson in judging someone from their appearances.

Today's FIAR activity didn't go exactly as planned. We have a book written by Barbara Rainey about the history of Thanksgiving, so I thought that would be a great go-along to explain the origins of this holiday. Sigh. I didn't realize it was so in-depth. Don't get me wrong - it's fabulous to learn the nitty gritty details. I just wish I had opened it earlier to decide if a squirmy 4 yo could sit through it. Plan A didn't work so much, but I'm not giving up. Plan B will be to find more age-appropriate explanations of Thanksgiving to try later this week. Or maybe we'll do that next week (I don't have any plans for school next week). A friend had asked what Thanksgiving crafts I had planned, which made me realize that I had completely whiffed on that. Another sigh. So maybe we can do crafts & light history next week. The phrase "the best laid plans" comes to mind.

Math was pretty interesting today. Jimmy did very well on calendar work (he's really getting excited about Thanksgiving now; he's noticing that it's getting closer & he realized that it was the holiday in our book). We're keeping this up, though, to help him with Thursdays, 13, 20, and 30. The math activity proved to be finally challenging. We used pattern blocks (always a bit hit around here). First, Jimmy filled in a pattern that showed which shapes to place where. Then Jimmy had to fill in 3 different shapes that did not show which shapes to use. He figured out right away that he wasn't going to find the exact match to what was on the paper. For 2 of the 3 patterns, he was able to pick out the necessary pieces immediately. The middle of the patterns gave him a little challenge, but he didn't get frustrated. He stopped, thought about the problem, carefully positioned the pieces he did place, and identified the piece that would fill in the gap. Caleb had his own pattern to fill in, and he did very well... until he got bored and wandered away. =)

This week's letters are H and I. To start the week, I read the Bible verses we'll be memorizing ("Honor your father and your mother." Exodus 20:12 and "I can do all things through Christ who strengthens me." Philippians 4:13) along with the stories in the book that help explain what the verse really means. I was amazed at how well Jimmy understood the concept that Jesus gives us spiritual muscles ("all things" being all the things that God commands us to do), but he had a surprising amount of trouble getting what "honor" meant. That certainly explains a lot. LOL!

Yesterday & Today

Totally forgot to update this yesterday. Yeesh!

So.... yesterday's lessons went well. We did math, and Jimmy had a minor struggle with his calendar work. It was the 13th, and he has problems with numbers between 12 and 20, and then again at the 10's from then on. I'm going to give him lots of opportunities to count this month by having him count all the days. He also has a little trouble remembering Thursday, so we'll work on memorizing the days of the week a little more. Our math activity was a big milestone - his first test! Which he aced. He was actually bored & asked when we were going to do something. After I finished the questions, he kept playing with the linking cubes to do something more challenging. The test involved me laying out 8 unlinked blue linking cubes. Jimmy had to count them, then make a row of yellow linking cubes to match (I gave him a pile of 10 yellow cubes). After the test, he decided to make a blue-yellow pattern out of the linking cubes.

Normally, on Thursdays, we would make lap books for the FIAR book and for the LotW. Since we didn't have a FIAR book this week & I wanted to spend time doing music, I decided to postpone the letter G book another day. So Jimmy recited his Bible verse (nailed it), practiced writing G and g, & read several words that start with the letter G. At one point, he got frustrated trying to write, but I lavished praise on what he had already done (which was deserved - his letters were very good), he regained his confidence & wrote even better letters. He had a little trouble reading the words, but they were rather difficult words. I tried to include a lot of trends, such as the "gr" sound, to make it a little easier. That seemed to work pretty well. I know he has the ability to learn to read; he just needs to see progress to keep from being overwhelmed.

For music, I brought out a new toy - rhythm sticks! We learned some different ways that the sticks could be used, but then we stuck to tapping the thinner smooth stick against the thicker ridged stick. We tapped along to She'll Be Coming 'Round the Mountain and Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star. Jimmy was able to keep the rhythm better when he focused on tapping instead of singing. Caleb seemed to prefer the method of rubbing the smooth stick over the ridged stick, so I didn't get much of a chance to see what rhythm he felt. =)

For today's lessons, we read a pseudo-FIAR book. It's The Little Puppy by Judy & Phoebe Dunn. Last year, we read the Before FIAR book The Little Rabbit by the same author/photographer. I was hoping to re-read that along with The Little Puppy, but the library didn't get it in on time. The boys both enjoyed The Little Puppy, though, so no harm. It was nice to have a break from the FIAR books, but it was sweet to get back into reading with two eager little learners sitting on my lap.

Math today went very well. Jimmy did much better at his calendar work (14 is a much easier number than 13 and Friday is easier to remember than Thursday). He very proudly announced the correct date on the first try. The math activity bored him again. I can't wait to get a chance to review what we're doing this year to try to keep him challenged. The approach that this curriculum takes seems to fit very nicely with Jimmy's learning style, so he might just need to move up to a higher level. I'm going to see if I can borrow a 1st grade level book (he's currently doing grade K) to see if it would better suit him or if it would be too much right now. My mother-in-law has also offered to check what homeschooling families in her church are using. I'm a little hesitant about being overwhelmed by options, but it's certainly better than being underwhelmed! It will be good to at least know what else is out there in case the 1st grade level proves to be too much for Jimmy right now.

After math (yes, I'm back on track now), we finished up with our letter work. Jimmy recited his F & G Bible verses - very nicely, I might add, although he needed some coaxing to sit still enough to be understandable. Then he colored in & cut out some pictures of things that start with G. I glued them into his lapbook then showed him how to write their names. His handwriting is getting pretty good. We have to work on letter height, though... his "l" was the same height as his "i". Our work on his little g has made a big improvement on his little a, too.

So, another week over. The boys are spending the weekend with their Oma (my mother-in-law) so that Randy & I can tackle some things around the house. See you next week! We'll be reading Cranberry Thanksgiving.

Leaf and let leaf

Yesterday, I wrote "Thanksgiving" on our math calendar. There are no numbers (we write the date in each day), so it's just the word in a square. I explained that I wrote it on Thanksgiving, when we'll have a big meal with our whole family. I wasn't sure, tho, if Jimmy would understand the concept of it being a finite number of days away. Today, he showed that he did understand - without prompting, he counted the number of days until Thanksgiving. =) And as yesterday, he did fabulously on the rest of the lesson. Spelling the different words (we spell the month & the day of the week) seems to be working to help him remember them. Today, Jimmy noticed that all of our months so far all end in "ber" & that the days of the week all end in "day." Smart cookie.

For our math activity, we made a bar graph. (The lesson we skipped was making a pictograph of the same thing.) I pulled out some family pictures, and Jimmy chose linking cubes to represent each person's hair color. To protect those in denial, I won't tell you how many of each color Jimmy graphed... LOL! As with all of our graphs, Jimmy identified the tallest column, the shortest column, and any columns that had the same number of blocks.

Then we reviewed all of the Bible verses so far. Jimmy flew through all of them, including last week's F verse (it's the first time he didn't stumble even a little). He very nearly has the G verse. He practiced his handwriting next - big G and little g. He's doing very well & he really likes the star system. I draw stars under the good letters, which gives him confidence but also shows him what letters are not good (and gives us an opportunity to talk about why they aren't good). Tomorrow, we'll add some review work to the handwriting lesson so he doesn't forget A-F.

I had originally planned to do art today, but the boys enjoyed being outside yesterday. So today, we had more PE. We took a walk, then the boys played with their scooter/Cozy Coupe & their balls. I took the opportunity to get the leaves out of the driveway. The boys still don't like the leaf blower, but at least they're no longer terrified. Caleb was even brave enough to "rescue" his Cozy Coupe from the Evil Leaf Blower of Doom.

Loose day

I decided to skip the math lesson planned for today (the one we skipped yesterday). I read ahead, and tomorrow's math lesson was a review of the same one, so I'll just do it all then. I had a choice to jump ahead to tomorrow's lesson (gaining ground on the school year) or to have a very light school day. I opted for the latter. Two reasons - 1) I'm planning on revamping our math lessons soon, so we'll probably already be finishing math very early this year and 2) I wanted to take advantage of the extra time to play outside. It's a beautiful day!

So we started with calendar work. Jimmy is becoming quite the expert! I'm going to have to look into what else we can do with the calendar to make it more challenging for him. I already know that he struggles with the higher numbers, so for now, we'll focus on maintaining what he already knows, counting higher numbers, and looking forward to future events.

Next, we worked on LofW - G. Jimmy & I repeated the memory verse 3 times, then he gave it a shot on his own (not too bad, just some stumbles over the new words: "preach" and "gospel"). I also asked him to recite the F verse. Then we looked at the letter chart to see what a G and g look like. He wrote 4 or 5 of each. His big G's looked pretty good... until he got lazy at the end. His little g's were very nice. We are still working on the circle-line (same problem he has with little a's), but all of his letters today were very readable. He is much more excited about handwriting now & he is a lot more confident.

Then... we played outside. Hey, PE is a school subject, right? =) We took a walk up our street, then played in the leaves in our front yard, then played with Caleb's Cosy Coupe, Jimmy's scooter, and my basketball hoop. I'd love for this to have tired them out enough to take a nice, loooong nap!

After a quick, warm lunch, I gave them both baths. We did our singing & rhythm lessons during their bath. The bath should also help their naps. Hey, a girl can dream!

Non-FIAR week

When I planned out the school year, I realized that I had 26 weeks of school (1 for each letter in the alphabet), but only 19 Five-in-a-Row books. For some weeks, I planned some topic studies, like reading age-appropriate books on slavery after we read Who Owns the Sun? For other weeks, I planned to re-read some BFIAR (Before FIAR, which Jimmy did last year). This week was originally planned to be a BFIAR week with The Little Rabbit by Judy & Phoebe Dunn. We also own The Little Puppy (same authors), so I thought it would be nice to study both together.

Well, the library didn't get The Little Rabbit transferred on time. So I did a quick re-think. We're going to have a FIAR-free week of school. If The Little Rabbit gets to our library on time, we might read the 2 Dunn books on Friday. Otherwise, we're going to use that time to do some other things.

Today, we started with math. Jimmy did amazingly well at his calendar work. He read today's date without me first reading it or even pointing out the different parts of the date. I think I'm going to relax the calendar work for a while, letting him guide things there. He still needs some work on the days of the week (particularly Thursdays - he seems to have a mental block against "th" sounds), but otherwise, we'll just fill in the date, follow our color pattern, and read today's date. I added something new to this work - I wrote Thanksgiving Day into the calendar. It will be fun to watch him look forward to it on our calendar. Of course, this means we'll be doing at least calendar work on our Thanksgiving break. =)

For the math activity, I skipped the next lesson because I wasn't prepared. I forgot to cut out slips of paper to represent our family's hair colors. So we'll try to do that lesson tomorrow. Today, we did more pattern work with linking cubes. Jimmy, of course, did fantastically well. Caleb was getting into the mix, too. He made a tower of blocks that came really close to our ABB pattern! Then when it was time to break the tower apart & count them, he counted along with us.

After math, I introduced the letter of the week - G. We read the new Bible verse & the story that helps explain it. This week's verse is "Go into all the world and preach the gospel to every creature." (Mark 16:15) The story prompted us to review our F verse, which was fantastic since Jimmy still needs a little more practice on that one. It also got us talking about the Gospel. Jimmy needed a little prodding, but once he figured out what I was asking, he was able to clearly tell me the good news. "Jesus died, which was bad, but this was good news because it took away our sins."

Now for the fun part - with the time we saved from not doing FIAR, we painted with watercolors! Caleb has a book that already has the color on the pages - you just smear a wet paint brush over the pages to "paint" the picture. Jimmy & I painted on plain construction paper. At first, Jimmy was painting stripes of color on his paper. But once I started painting a picture (brown mountains with green grass, blue sky, and a yellow sun), he realized that he could paint a picture of something. He asked for a new piece of paper, then painted a face. I think it was of me... Not sure, but it did have long hair. LOL!

Tastebuds experiment - pictures

Jimmy tried lemon juice first. Pucker power!

Next was salt water. Jimmy is definitely NOT a fan. Yuck!
Last was sugar water. Big surprise - Jimmy liked it! =)

Tastebuds experiment

For today's lessons, we started with math. Jimmy did very well at his calendar work. He read today's date without me pointing at the parts that make up today's date (Saturday, November 8th, 2008). He is still having some trouble with the days of the week, but he's getting better as he memorizes it more & feels more comfortable reading. The teacher's guide has him spelling out many of the words, which I didn't understand at first (it's a math book not language arts), but I can see a big jump in his understanding since the spelling part was added in. I think it makes him pay more attention to the actual word instead of simply the placement on the page.

For the activity part of math, we played with teddy bear counters. We ran through the story in the book first. The workmat (a piece of construction paper) was our pretend bus. We lined up teddy bears at the bus stop (off of the map). Some bears got on the bus, some bears got off of the bus. We counted the bears on the bus after each change. Then it was Jimmy's time to make up a story about the bears on the bus. This was his 2nd time to make up a math story. This story was much more elaborate than the last story lesson. I wasn't sure we would be able to eat lunch on time! =)

We finished our F week for letter-of-the-week. Jimmy recited his Bible verse very well (with some hiccups, but we'll just make sure to review it again during next week). I gave him a mini-independent working assignment - he was to write some big F's and some little f's (the number was up to him). He wasn't to give it to me to review until he had written all of his F & f's. This task was partly to teach him to start doing some independent work... but mostly to allow me to spend some time with Caleb, who was acting out a little. The snuggle time with Caleb helped the rest of the lesson time, and the independent work of Jimmy gave him a lot of confidence. Win-win! Oh, and Jimmy's letters were fantastic!

Finally it was time for our FIAR book. We read Lentil for the last time this week. This time, I focused more on the lemon that the mean character eats (it makes the band pucker up, leaving them unable to play on a very special occasion). After the reading, we had a very special experiment. I gave Jimmy 3 cups to taste. The 1st contained lemon juice. He wasn't sure if he liked it - it reminded him of lemons (good) but also of pickles (not good). The 2nd contained salt water. Jimmy tasted salt water during our How to Make an Apple Pie & See the World lessons (our 1st week of school this year), so he knew exactly what it was. And he definitely didn't like it. The 3rd cup had sugar water. This, as you can imagine, was a huge hit. After tasting each cup, I explained a little about tastebuds. I wasn't expecting him to understand much of it (the goal was merely to lay some groundwork), but he surprised me with how much he could understand.

Audiobookworms

Mommy's not the only one who loves books! The boys have really gotten into read-along books. I remember really liking them as a kid (thanks, Mom!). My favorite was Thumbellina. I wonder what their favorites will be?

Mommy's ongoing education

I currently have 55 books on my to-read list. Life is good!!! LOL! But the really nerdy part is that I want to get through these quickly so I can move on to read... nerd alert... history books and biographies (I warned you). I never got into those topics in school, but I've found that I actually really enjoy them if told in an interesting storyteller style. It's a lot more exciting when you're not doing it to memorize facts for a test. So far, I've read about Abigail Adams and Abraham Lincoln. I had no idea about dear ol' Abe!!! I'm not sure what my next targets will be, but I figure with 55 other books in line, I've got some time.

Arts & crafts

Yesterday, as we read Lentil, I pointed out the essential elements of a story - setting the stage (location, characters, etc), rising action/conflict, climax, and resolution. I hadn't actually realized that there were a few mini-climaxes in the book until then. Today's Lentil task was the lapbook. We pasted the music for She'll Be Coming 'Round the Mountain, a picture of a harmonica (which Jimmy colored & cut out), and a map where Jimmy found Ohio (where the book takes place) and New Jersey (where we live). We also caught up on the lapbooks from our last 2 FIAR books - Very Last First Time and Mike Mulligan & His Steam Shovel.

Math was more calendar. Update - Jimmy read today's date very, very well! He is very proud of himself. We did patterns with linking cubes yesterday & teddy bear counters today. I allowed Jimmy to go a lot more advanced than the book today. The book was working on AB patterns, but he also made ABB and ABC patterns. I think I'll take our Thanksgiving break to review how we're going to proceed with our math lessons. He can definitely skip ahead, but I need time to plan it out well.

Letter of the Week is going well. He has very nearly memorized this week's Bible verse. By tomorrow, he'll have it down pat. His handwriting has taken a huge leap. He is a lot more confident. We did our F lapbook today, but we also did C, D, & E's lapbooks to catch up. That might have been a little too much writing (the lapbooks are filled with pictures he colors, cuts out, and labels by copying my labels). We did the lapbooks in order & ended with "football." That may have cured the letter/handwriting overdose. Football is a long word, but an easy one with easy letters. Plus, he was really excited about writing it. I'm going to start looking into some more advanced writing tasks for him, probably over my starting-to-get-very-full Thanksgiving break. I might be able to use something from the phonics book we tried to use last year. Hey, I might even be able to trick him into reading that way! LOL!

Today's lessons

I had so much fun with today's lessons! Good thing, too... this morning didn't particularly go well. Think hyper, early morning risers meet mom-who-stayed-up-to-watch-the-election-results. Sigh.

We started by reading this week's FIAR book - Lentil. It was funny listening to Jimmy try to pronounce "harmonica" but he actually got very close. We reviewed states & the name of our country (altho he thinks it should be America States). I told him that a new President of the United States was elected yesterday, and we helped by voting. (I didn't mention that the guy I voted for didn't win...) Our FIAR lesson was combined with our weekly music lesson. I gently introduced fractions by writing out music with linking cubes. Some notes used more linking cubes than others. We sang 2 songs (She'll Be Comin' Around the Mountain, which was used in Lentil, and Michael Row Your Boat Ashore, which made an interesting linking cube display). I taped out the beat on each individual cube so the boys could see how long it took to sing some notes & how short it took to sing others. This was a big hit. I think we should use this more to teach rhythm.

Next was our Saxon math lesson. Jimmy did fantastic on the calendar portion. I'm still planning on doing this every day, but we can definitely back off by the middle-to-end of the year. The book is starting to make things fun by adding spelling. This is really going to help Jimmy's letter lessons. The activity portion was a bit hectic. I had cut out small circles, big circles, small rectangles, and big rectangles. We worked on sorting by color, then arranging in rows & columns by color, shape & size. This was definitely beneath Jimmy, but interestingly enough, Caleb really got into it.

We did the LotW stuff last. The Bible verse is pretty long, but Jimmy is doing alright. We went over it piece by piece 3 times, then I helped him recite it. It's not quite memorized yet, but he'll get it. He wrote big F and little f each several times. Big F, as I predicted, was cake for him. It's just big E without one of the lines. Little f, tho, surprised me - he got it right away! I guess something clicked last week when reviewing C & c. I thought for sure that the little hook at the top would throw him off. We added something new to handwriting as an incentive - I draw little stars under the good letters. He really liked that.

So far this week...

On Monday, we finished Mike Mulligan & His Steam Shovel. We haven't yet made the lapbook (we also need to make a lapbook for Very Last First Time, as well as lapbooks for C, D, & E), but I'm hoping to do that during this week's art lessons. Our last Mike Mulligan lesson was a math lesson, which was especially timely since I had planned on skipping the rather dull Saxon math lesson that day. Anyway, we talked about Mike's brag that Mary Anne (the steam shovel) could dig as much in a day as a hundred men could dig in a week. One hundred is still a little out of Jimmy's comprehension, so I simplified it. "If one hundred men could dig one penny's worth a day, how many could they dig in a week?" We used the Saxon calendar to help us count. Then we increased that to 2 pennies, 3 pennies, 4 pennies, and 5 pennies. I wanted to be sure we counted higher than 30, since Jimmy was having trouble with the 10's during our calendar lessons. This was a very light introduction to multiplication. For our formal math lessons, as I've said, we just stuck with the calendar lesson. It was our first day in November, and Jimmy understood the change a lot better than for October. Understandably so, since October was his first month change lesson. He is a lot more comfortable in the lower number days, too. We really need to work on higher number counting. We finished up D & E letter of the week - Jimmy had the Bible verses down pat, and he even started writing some words. We stuck mostly with words that had a/b/c/d/e, but I did sneak in Caleb's name. The little "l" wasn't too hard, and Jimmy thought it was a lot of fun. He needs me to keep handwriting extra fun for him since he's not all that interested just yet. I am hoping to get him more interested in words in general with some computer games and read-along books

Yesterday's lessons started a new book - Lentil by Robert McCloskey. We had read a McCloskey book last year - Blueberries for Sal, which I have in a read-along format. I'm hoping to have Jimmy "read along" with the cassette sometime this week. Yesterday was Election Day, so it was very cool to have our "I voted" stickers for this lesson. We discussed geography. I had Jimmy find Ohio on the map (the setting of the book) & I showed him where New Jersey is. Then I counted the states. I showed him the flag on the stickers & explained that the 13 stripes represent the original 13 states. Jimmy guessed that there are 50 stars for the 50 states. He's such a smart little guy! Then we had our math lesson, with a calendar lesson (he's improving on days of the week & becoming more confident on telling today's date) and a pattern block/sorting lesson. Caleb, of course, really liked playing with the pattern blocks. For letter-of-the-week, I introduced the letter F, shared this week's Bible verse (John 3:16 - how fun!), and told the story in the Bible verse book. Jimmy was really excited that we can give Jesus gifts by helping people & singing praise songs. When it was time for naps, we sang the song from Lentil (She'll be comin' round the mountain) as our gift to Jesus.

I am hoping to have a lot more music in this week's lessons. Lentil is a cute story about a little boy who wants to sing but has absolutely no singing talent. Instead, he saves up money to buy a harmonica. He practices very hard every day until he gets good. He ends up playing his harmonica for the most important citizen in his town. This is a good reminder to practice music. And let me tell you, No-Rhythm Jimmy could use some practice! LOL!

Happy Halloween!

Batman (aka Jimmy)

&

Superman (aka Caleb)

We're baaaaack!

We're back from our travels. Actually, we've been back for a while. I just haven't posted... Bad Di! LOL! While we were traveling, we finished Very Last First Time. We found Ungava Bay (the setting of the book) on a map, we talked about the silly "very last first" wording, and we chose colors that reflected various moods (the author colored her pictures with different colors as the character felt different things). Jimmy learned his Bible verse very well but had trouble writing C's. After ending that first week, we put school on hold for a little while. Jimmy was having trouble concentrating and we were bouncing around a lot more during the second week. Then we took another week off after coming home so the boys could get back into their nap & sleeping routines & so I could get the house back in shape.

We started school back up again this week. Tuesday was our first lesson this week. We're reading Mike Mulligan & His Steam Shovel by Virginia Lee Burton. This book was one of Randy's favorites growing up. On Tuesday, we discussed "personification" (Jimmy was nearly able to pronounce it, but you should have heard Caleb try!) - the steam shovel is obviously not alive but Mike named her Mary Anne. We talked about people with names, pets with names (they can think, even though they can't talk), and toys with names (they are not alive b/c they can't think). I told them that people name all sorts of things that are not alive, like boats or cars. Jimmy named the red maple tree in our front yard - Maple Fall. On Wednesday, we talked about stewardship, since Mike takes very good care of Mary Anne. We also got into bragging & taking advantage of someone. In the story, Mike brags that Mary Anne can dig a lot more than he's sure she can dig. He bets that she can dig a whole cellar for a town hall in one day or the town doesn't have to pay him. A townsperson takes him up on the offer, fully believing that Mike & Mary Anne won't be able to do it. We talked about how both of them acted badly. Yesterday, we experimented with steam. Don't worry - I didn't let the boys get too close! =) I boiled some water on the stove with them looking on from a chair at the other end of the counter. They saw the water vapor as the pot boiled on. Then I put a lid on the pot & they saw the steam concentrate in a few streams. Finally, I pushed the lid down so that only 1 steam stream was left. They heard the whistle & saw how powerful the stream was getting. Today, we looked at the trees Burton drew. Her trees have obvious tree branches. There are scenes that have trees with leaves and other scenes with trees with no leaves. The subject today was art, so Jimmy drew tree trucks with branches - some with leaves & some without. We'll put those trees in this week's FIAR lapbook.

In math this week, Jimmy is making pretty good progress in the calendar lessons. He's having trouble with numbers over 29, so we'll make sure to add higher level counting to his lessons. He's doing better with days of the week, mostly because he's trying as hard as possible to not read. Stinker. He's having a lot more fun with it because he knows that he's getting the right answers. I can see a lot of myself in him - we pick things up easily & so get bored easily, but if a tough thing comes up, we get frustrated & tend to give up. I'll have to find ways to keep him motivated in both circumstances. In his other math lessons, we've introduced sorting & storytelling. Jimmy knew all about sorting before these lessons, so I mainly focused on the following directions part of the lesson. He knew what I was going to ask him to do, but I required him to wait until I actually told him to do something. Storytelling came in today. We played with counting bears, making up stories about up to 5 bears playing on a playground (the work mat). Some bears would go to the playground, some would leave the playground. It's an obvious introduction to addition & subtraction. Jimmy really enjoyed it & had fun making up his own story.

Because of our 2 week break, I did a little juggling in our school schedule. I am trying to allow extra time at the end of the year for make-up time if anything happens (last year, I was sick several times, leaving me without a voice). So instead of just pushing back the schedule, I rearranged things to fit in our current schedule. I want to make sure we are reading Cranberry Thanksgiving in the week before Thanksgiving, and I want to keep the Christmas stories & winter stories in their appropriate time frames as well. So I dropped one book (it was a Before FIAR book, so we had already read it last year) & merged two books (also BFIAR) into one week. Math was fine, since we had lots of wiggle room - less lessons than teaching days. Letter of the Week was an interesting challenge. I decided to put D & E in this week and H & I in the week before Thanksgiving. Those 4 letters should be fairly easy for Jimmy to learn to write. I think it worked out very well this week. He was at first reluctant to write his letters (very reminiscent of last year's reading lesson battles), so I eased off. It was a little worrisome since I had a goal of 2 letters for the week. But it paid off - he very happily wrote all of his letters to date yesterday. His A & a's were a little rusty, but he loved the practice. His C's have improved tremendously. I think his frustration was over not being able to make a decent C during the last week of school. Now he feels more confident & is happy about writing again. His D, d, E, and e's have been very good. The Bible verses posed a small challenge, but it only meant that he didn't have them memorized on the first day of the week. All in all, this double letter week has gone very well. Plus, it added enough letters to his repetitiore that we can start writing words as part of the lessons. I am hoping that will encourage his reading.

It's over

That's my report for today. It wasn't the most fabulous of days, if I can be honest. We had fun during the actual learning, but it really felt like we were under attack today. First, we still had lessons from last week to finish, so today's lessons were a little longer than usual. Then, Caleb was extra cranky. And for the finale - my full, 32 oz cup of iced tea got knocked over by my laptop. Thankfully, the laptop & all of our school books were spared, but the water spilled onto the coffee table, on the shelf under the coffee table (where several wooden puzzles & board books are stored), and on the carpet. I managed to run for the paper towels while still teaching, so it seemed fairly harmless at first. Some of the stuff on the shelf did get wet, but I was able to mop up the tea before it caused damage. But then... I found a foamy part of the carpet. I have no idea what was there. I don't remember ever treating that part of the carpet with Resolve or any kind of soap. Oh... now that I think about it, I'll bet that it was car wash soap. While I was pregnant with Caleb, Jimmy drank car wash solution. I had been in the bathroom. Poison control said that it wasn't harmful (besides the possibility of diarrhea - wonderful), but I was freaked out anyway. That happened on the coffee table. I guess some dripped on the carpet. Well, whatever it was, it wasn't coming up. It just kept foaming. I went through an entire roll of papertowels until I simply gave up. The funniest part - I was teaching about crisis thinking. So I had to stop & go over the crisis thinking rules with Jimmy about what I was doing. "Calm down & don't panic." Deep breath for both of us. "Be quiet & think carefully - what am I supposed do to?" Find papertowels & mop up the mess. It actually ended up being a terrific example of today's lesson, since Jimmy isn't likely to find himself trapped under a frozen ocean surface with the tide coming back in (more on that later). But it still got me flustered. My mantra at the moment - "it's almost nap time. It's almost nap time."

Ok, so that aside... we had some pretty cool stuff to do today. We started with last week's book, NotMJ. We read it for the last time. Our activity was coins & their relative worth. Jimmy learned that a nickel is worth 5 pennies, a dime is worth 2 nickels or 10 pennies, and a quarter is worth 2 dimes & a nickel or 5 nickels or 25 pennies. He asked me for a quarter for his piggy bank afterward, but I gave him 3 dimes instead. He learned that 3 dimes are actually more money than 1 quarter. (Plus, it's easier to divide 3 dimes by 3 - his piggy bank has a section for offering, saving, & spending.)

Next was math, since I wanted to double up the second section. We reviewed the calendar. Jimmy is definitely getting better but has a long way still to go. I'm glad he is still challenged by this, since the rest of the math is getting rather boring. I'm considering speeding things up for him. Then we did the manipulative work. First lesson was making a graph. We asked family members, including aunts, uncles, and grandparents, what their favorite color teddy bear counter is. Jimmy lined up the bears according to color on a grid to make a chart. Blue was the obvious winner with 6 bears. Next was purple with 3 bears. Green, yellow, and red each had 1 bear. It made a very nice looking graph. I'm glad I added extended family, tho, because everyone in this house chose blue. =) The next manipulative lesson was more of what we did earlier. We counted 10 bears onto our work mats (aka construction paper). We slid them to one side as we counted, then we put them on pattern block "chairs" and slid them again to count. To clean up, we made a pile of our teddy bears & a pile of our pattern blocks. Jimmy learned how to quickly clean up the toys afterward by putting one pile on the work mat, picking up the mat, and sliding into the appropriate bin. He did the same for the other pile. I sense that I will be witnessing practice sessions of this new skill. =)

We moved onto this week's book - The Very Last First Time by Jan Andrews. It's about an Inuit girl named Eva living in northern Canada. The villagers rely on muscles from under the sea roof for food. The sea roof is formed when the top of the ocean forms, then the tide goes out. The sea floor is exposed, but there is a ceiling of frozen water over it. Eva has always gone with her mother, but she is now old enough to go all by herself. She climbs down, fills her muscle pan, and then, since she is enjoying the experience, does a little exploring. Her candle goes out just as she hears the tide returning. She starts to panic, but then remembers that she has more candles & matches in her pocket. She manages to light another candle, find her muscles, and return to the ice hole safely. Our activity today, as I mentioned earlier, was discussing crisis safety. Eva calmed herself down, thought carefully, and made a plan - find & light another candle. Both boys were mesmorized by the story. Jimmy even noticed, right on the first page before the author explained it... "There aren't any trees!" Good eye, my fellow.

Last by not least, letter of the week. It's C this week. We read the Bible verse & its story explaining what it means. I love this verse for obvious reasons - "Children, obey your parents in all things, for this is well pleasing to the Lord." Colossians 3:20. God, bury this one deep, ok? LOL! Jimmy learned how to write a big C and a little C. This letter is going to be tougher than I thought. How can C be hard? But he keeps trying to close the loop, making them all look like O's. We're going to have to practice this one. I also had him write a few A's and B's, both big & small, as a review. They looked pretty good, although the little a's need some extra attention.

That was it. Whew. We're going to have most of the lessons for the next week & a half on the road. I hope I can post entries for those days, but I might not have an internet connection for part of it. I'm praying that our lessons go smoothly as we travel!

TGIF

I am soooooo glad we skipped school yesterday. We had a much better day today.

We started with math this morning. Jimmy reviewed the calendar (he's getting good at it, but he's not even close to being bored yet, so we'll keep it up). Then we played with linking cubes, this time with a little more structure. We linked 5 cubes again, compared the stacks again, but then we repeated the color pattern from our calendar. October's color pattern is orange-brown. So we linked a brown cube on an orange cube, added an orange cube, then a brown cube, then an orange cube. This taught counting (using linking cubes) plus pattern repetition. The counting part is definitely beneath Jimmy, but I understand the need to build on the simple counting skills so we can get to the more complex stuff like addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division eventually.

Today was art day, so we read through the book, NotMJ, reviewing italics. We drew with pastels to see how the author/artist created this book. Then we decorated a picture of moon jellyfish by covering it with sparkly ribbon (I couldn't find any glitter in the house, so I improvised). We glued the moonjellies into our lapbook for NotMJ along with the map we colored earlier this week. I also printed out a cover for the front of the lapbook folder.

Then we moved onto the letter of the week - B. Jimmy reviewed his memory verse, which he has completely memorized. He colored pictures of objects that start with B - book, ball, etc. Then he cut them out & we glued them into the LotW lapbook. I wrote captions which Jimmy copied. His little "a" was not so good, so we'll have to keep reviewing handwriting somehow. I think these lapbooks are a good way of doing that, but I might need to add a few other whole-word writing into our handwriting practice during the rest of the week.

Caleb actually sat to hear the book today. He really enjoyed using the scissors during LotW work. And, as always, he loved playing with the linking cubes. We made big improvement when it came time to clean them up. It's usually a lot more challenging to get him to give up those fun math toys.

Playing hookey

We skipped school today. We're going to have lessons tomorrow & Saturday instead. All 3 of us were cranky this morning, so I decided it wasn't worth making school feel miserable to "stick to a schedule." This is all about learning & having fun learning.

No regrets!!

At least not now. Ask me again on Saturday. =)

Light day

Jimmy worked a little with Grandmom this morning. She brought us workbooks with lots of learning games, like "which one is different?" Jimmy had a lot of fun learning with her. So I made our official lessons a little light today so as not to overwhelm him this morning.

We read our book (NotMJ) and discussed the boat's name, Periwinkle. The name is in italics in the book (as it is here) & Jimmy learned that boat names should be printed in italics. We'll be discussing other uses of italics at other times this year when they come up in our other books (Storm in the Night is one).

For math, we started our October calendar. I'm going to have to jump around in the Saxon teaching manual a little - it is set up for 12 lessons per month, but I am doing a lesson every weekday (except for a few breaks during holidays). When he gets better at understanding the calendar, I may perhaps just do 12 calendar lessons a month. We'll see. After the calendar, we introduced a new math tool - linking cubes. This was a big hit with Caleb (I'm sensing a trend... he likes manipulatives), but Jimmy really enjoyed these as well. After they got a chance to play with them on their own, Jimmy & I worked on making a tower of 5 cubes. We counted them as we put them together, we compared two towers of 5 cubes (his tower & my tower) to see that they were the same size & had the same number of cubes, and we counted them as we took them apart.

Jimmy reviewed his Bible verse today. He is definitely improving. He remembers last week's verse perfectly, too. I'm hoping to keep building on these verses, but I'm not sure how to handle it when we have quite a few verses to review. Perhaps we will just review a few past verses at a time instead of the whole lot. After our memory verse, Jimmy wrote 4 more big B's and 4 more little b's. His big B's are still very good and his little b's are showing definite improvement. The breakthrough of the day was him learning which two lines (plus one dotted line) to use as a guide for how tall to make the line & the bump. We tried the sight word flash cards, but he was too mentally tired.

After our official lessons, Jimmy read a few 1st level readers with Grandmom. He was still drained, but Grandmom got him to read a few of the words with her. I think readers & sight word flash cards may be the way to go for Jimmy's reading lessons.

School with Grandmom

We read Night of the Moonjellies again today. Today, we discussed New England. We looked at a map of New England, guessed where Mark & his Gram might live (close to the ocean, since Mark walked to the hot dog stand), and colored in the different stated in New England. We'll put this map into our lapbook on Thursday.

Math today was calendar review, then counting using teddy bear counters, pattern blocks, and work mats. The work mats are just sheets of construction paper. The bears are lined up on one side of the mat. To count, we slide the bears to the other side. Then we have to get pattern blocks for each teddy bear (remembering how many we counted, then counting the same number of pattern blocks). The teddy bears "sit" on the pattern blocks, and we count them all over again. As always, this was Caleb's favorite part of the lessons.

For Letter of the Week, Jimmy reviewed his memory verse. He almost has is down - he's just struggling with "Blessed are the peacemakers for..." I'm still impressed! Then we wrote 4 big B's and 4 little b's. His big B's are very nice, but we'll need to work a little on the little b's.

We finished up with our sight word flash cards. He hasn't memorized them yet, but I think that's a good thing. We're getting plenty of opportunity to practice phonics.

The boys were a little distracted with Grandmom here (she noticed that Jimmy didn't sit still very well), but we still managed to do everything on the lesson plan without me struggling to keep their attention. This is a HUGE improvement over last year, where we wouldn't have been able to do squat if our routine varied in the slightest. Caleb really enjoyed having someone to talk with while I worked one-on-one with Jimmy.

Now it's time to head out to Raptor Trust. Raptor Trust is a sanctuary/medical aid facility for birds, particularly raptors (like eagles & hawks). I've been there once before, and I'm excited to see how the boys react. We might still head over to the zoo afterward. It all depends on how things go today. The word of the day is "flexible!"

Night of the Moonjellies

That's the name of the FIAR book we're reading this week. It's a really cute story about a little boy who finds a moon jellyfish on his way to the family hot dog stand, where he helps. After a long, busy day, his grandmother takes him out to sea so they can release the moonjelly & see all of the glittery jellyfish. After we read the book, we looked up moon jellyfish online to learn a little more about them. Jimmy remembered that we saw them at the Pittsburgh Zoo earlier this month. Jimmy & Caleb both loved the short video of a moonjelly pulsating the best of all of internet research this morning.

For math, we again reviewed the calendar. Then we brought out the pictogram we did last Friday. Today, we added several more family members, sorted them by boy/girl, and glued them on the big graph. It's now hanging on the wall. We finished math by playing with teddy bear counters and pattern blocks - together! Caleb really liked this part, and he was sad when it was time to put them away.

The letter of this week is B. We read our Bible verse - "Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called sons of God." Matthew 5:9. It's a little longer than last week's verse, but I'm sure Jimmy will have it memorized in no time. We'll start handwritting the big & little B's tomorrow.

I dug out some sight word flash cards. I had Jimmy read the 1 & 2 letter words, plus a handful of related 3 letter words (like "yes" along with "no" and some key ones like "the" and "and"). Jimmy remembers a lot of the phonics work we did last year, which impresses me since we had so much trouble with that curriculum. It makes me feel better knowing that he'll still be learning even when I mess things up for a little while. =) I think he might do better in an unstructured phonics program for now, even though he's doing well in structured math.

Tomorrow we'll have a guest at school - Grandmom!

First week - CHECK!

All done! This week went very well. Today, Jimmy finally noticed that we've read the same book all week. LOL!

I forgot to post yesterday, so I'll give that update first.

We started by doing math. We reviewed the calendar & played with our new teddy bear counters. Jimmy is really coming along with the calendar stuff. The only problem he's still having is with the dates, & that's because we started so late in the month. Counting in the 20's is still problematic. But we're getting there! Reading the days of the week is helping him learn to read in general, too, so that's a bonus. After math, we read the book of the week (HtMaAP&StW) & reviewed the Bible memory verse. (Jimmy is really good at the memory verse.) Then we settled into the big project of the day - making lapbooks! We used tabbed file folders as the base & glued on different things. We made one for the book, with a map (marking where the apple pie maker went to get her ingredients), a hand-drawn street scene (Jimmy drew our street; it represents one of the pages in the book where she's getting a chicken from Paris to lay eggs for her pie), and apples (well, that's obvious, isn't it?). We made another one for the Letter of the Week - A. This also had an apple (same as the book's lapbook) & a picture of an ant. I wrote "apple" and "ant" under the pictures, then Jimmy wrote them. It will be cool to see how his handwriting improves during the year. I had intended them to be simply lap books, but Jimmy wants to store his paperwork in them. This week, we only had handwritting practice for "A" and "a" but I can see us storing all kinds of other things in both folders in future weeks.

Today's lessons were much more laid back. We started with the book. Today's book activity was introducing kitchen measuring devices. The book has an apple pie recipe at the end. We read the recipe's ingredients & found what we'd need to use to measure them. Cup, 1/2 cup, teaspoon, 1/4 teaspoon, and tablespoon. I think Jimmy was rather unimpressed, tho. =) Then we did math. Jimmy did well with the calendar, as usual. Then we introduced pictograms. Jimmy drew faces on round pieces of paper to represent him, me, Daddy, & Caleb. Then he sorted them onto a table by boys & girls. He learned that we could easily tell how many people in our family were boys & how many were girls by using this chart. I think we're going to expand on this by adding members of our extended family. Caleb didn't like this math lesson as much, tho - no toys! LOL! We finished by quickly reviewing our Bible verse (Jimmy has it completely memorized) & practicing writing A and a.

This was an amazing week. I hope it continues! We all had a fabulous time. (Even Caleb, who got cranky at parts - he still cheers when I announce "It's schooltime!!!")

Sneaky mommy

Tonight, I snuck carrot puree (from our own garden) into the pancake mix. The boys ate them all up! Definitely going to do that again!

*sneak* *sneak* *sneak*

School tantrum

Caleb was NOT happy that we had school today. He ended up with a timeout. After the timeout, tho, he was a much happier camper. He colored during much of the rest of school.

Jimmy was a champ thru the whole thing. He was very patient & waited on the couch (aka school room) until I got back from dealing with Caleb.

School today was pretty light. We read the book, this time showing each place on the map. The girl in the book gathers ingredients for her pie from Italy (wheat for flour), Paris (chicken for eggs), Sri Lanka (kurundu bark for cinnamon), England (cow for milk for butter), Jamaica (for sugar cane for sugar, with a dip in the Atlantic Ocean for sea water for salt). Oh yeah, and Vermont for apples, which she almost forgot. Jimmy enjoyed our tour of the world.

Math was also pretty light. We did our calendar stuff, then introduced counting bears. I had orginally planned on using milk jug caps, but we didn't gather enough for today's lesson. I also read ahead & discovered that the counters being bears might actually be important. (They "get tired" in one lesson & need to "sit" on pattern blocks.) So I think we're going to the Educational Warehouse after naps today. Oh well, it was worth a shot. For today, tho, I found some Care Bear stickers that I put onto pieces of cardstock. Jimmy matched them (two of each Care Bear), & I had him group them by color groups. He counted the bears in each group & found out how to tell how many more there were in the larger group.

Finally, we did our Bible memory verse (Jimmy's already got it down pat) & wrote 4 more big A's and 4 more little a's. His handwriting is definitely better than yesterday's. By the end of the week, he'll be making rather decent A's. I think we'll review past letters in the weeks to come to keep his handwriting fresh. I'll have to find words that start with the Letter of the Week that contain our previous letters. (Like Bat, Cab, etc.)

Day 2

We had another great day of school. (I'll have re-read these when the days get tough.) We started by reading How to Make an Apple Pie & See the World- and I am really loving that book. We did some vocab words (ingredients, superb, locate, elegant, coax, native, plantation). Then we had our math lesson - more calendar & pattern blocks. Caleb again loved this part the most. I also learned that Caleb would probably do well coloring while Jimmy & me do the other parts of our lessons. Could have used that info during vocab, LOL!

We reviewed our Bible memory verse (A soft answer turns away wrath. Proverbs 15:1). The plan was then to just introduce the letter A, but the boys both wanted to write it. So Jimmy wrote 4 big A's and 4 little a's. Caleb colored over the A I drew on his notepad. =)

Then we had some music time. We have a CD from Randy's mom. The last track is Ancient Words, one of Randy's favorite praise songs. We sang that, clapping along. Then we sang Amazing Grace (going with the A theme). Finally, we tapped some rhythms on the floor. I tapped some for Jimmy to repeat, then Jimmy tapped some for me to repeat. Very basic stuff that still needs a lot of work, but I'm sure we'll make a lot of progress if I stick to it.

First day of school

We had a great morning. ('Cause that's when we're doing school... at least until I change my mind again. LOL!) I took a picture, being slightly jealous of my friends' kids with their adorable first-day-of-school pictures. Not quite the same, since there are no backpacks or nice clothes, but it works. =)

We started by reading How to Make an Apple Pie & See the World. Very cute book - a girl wants to make an apple pie, but the market is closed. Instead, she goes around the world to get the ingredients. One of the ingredients that she needs is salt, so she collects sea water & evaporates the water. Our activity today was to make sea water (the boys agreed that it tasted nasty). We put it into a shallow pan. Now we wait for it to evaporate.

Then we had a math lesson. I'm using Saxon Math for homeschoolers, the kindergarten edition. We filled in our calendar & discussed the day of the week (Monday), the day of the month (the 22nd), the month (September), and the year (2008). We'll be working on the calendar all year, so I am expecting it to take a while to sink into Jimmy's head. It's a pretty complex thing to learn. But so far, so good! Saxon makes it fun with alternating colors for each day (which means we'll also be working on patterns). After the calendar, we played with pattern blocks. Caleb got to join in. They made boats, flowers, houses, trains, and a few unidentifiable objects, LOL!

The last part of our school lessons was Letter of the Week. We're doing the alphabet in order, so this week is the letter A. We have a great book that goes through Bible memory verses by the alphabet. The verse for A is "A soft answer turns away wrath. Proverbs 15:1" So we read the verse & the story that explains it today. We'll work on writing the letter A & memorizing the Bible verse during the rest of the week.

After school, we took a walk around the neighborhood. It's a gorgeous day! I'm considering that part of school, too - PE!