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.
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