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!
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