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.