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.