Big review day

Jimmy actually *asked* to review a few things today. (He also asked for a math test, the little weirdo. LOL! But we didn't have one in today's lesson.) So we reviewed the A through L Bible memory verses. Jimmy remembered nearly every one perfectly except for the references. WTG, Jimmy! He also reviewed all of his letters, Aa-Ll. I asked if he wanted to copy letters or words, and he chose letters. Then I pulled out some phonics flash cards. We went over all of the cards up to L. Jimmy picked up most of them very quickly. They have pictures on the front to help describe the sound for each letter or letter combination, like a fish for F. Jimmy quickly realized that he could guess the sound by making the sounds of the pictures. We went over the different variations, like long & soft vowels, letter combinations (like ch), and the funky letters like c (could sound like s or k) and g (could sound like "guh" or like j).

For math, we did today's calendar work... and Jimmy got today's date completely correct! Today - a Thursday!!! Yay! Then we worked with linking cubes. The lesson number assumed we were in January (we're going through the lessons faster than the book intended), so we reviewed the pattern for December's calendar (red-green-green) and then introduced January's pattern (blue-blue-white-white). Jimmy got the concept very well, but we had to work on a little following-instructions issues. I think Jimmy was trying to show off to Daddy, who was in the room. After a correction by both me & Randy, Jimmy was much better about listening to what I actually was telling him to do.

Before reading The Clown of God, Jimmy & I discussed groups of objects. The main character of the story is a juggler, so I put 21 coins on the table & told Jimmy to pretend that they were eggplants that Giovanni could juggle. He had to tell me how many groups of 3 there could be. We worked on how to move the coins to be able to tell the most easily. Then I took away 1 coin (leaving 20) and asked him to do the same thing for groups of 2, 4, 10, and 5. He did very well.

We had a guest storytime reader today - Randy! Jimmy really liked that, but Randy learned just how squirmy Jimmy can be. =)