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!