Computer troubles

My laptop's power cable died over Thanksgiving, so I haven't been able to do much internet stuff. But thanks to my awesome hubby, I'm back up & running! Love ya, babe!

So... I was able to grab some time to look over the math curriculum. I sifted through a couple of dozen lessons & noted which ones we'll skip. I'm keeping the lessons that introduce new concepts or review concepts that Jimmy didn't immediately master. I'm also planning on adding the occasional easy concept just to keep him fresh on those ideas. But for now, we'll stick with what we're doing & skip lessons as appropriate. Once we've finished the book, I'll check to see if we should jump into 1st grade math or just do the calendar work plus computer games for the remainder of our school year.

This week's FIAR book is Storm in the Night by Mary Stolz. It's a story about a grandfather & grandson who pass the time during a thunderstorm power outage. So far, we've discussed Jimmy's favorite parts of the book (a Before FIAR trick that I used for this book b/c it was a much longer book than we're used to reading), how to handle fear (both of real danger, reviewing Very Last First Time, and things we realize aren't dangerous... like Jimmy's fear of spiders that aren't really there), and how an author can use punctuation to help tell the story (italics for emphasis & quotation marks to show that someone is talking). Lots of major things this week. Jimmy especially had fun with the italics as we read the book today. We've seen italics before, in Night of the Moonjellies for the name of the boat Periwinkle. I guess I'm going a little italics-crazy in this post, too. LOL!

For math, we skipped a few lessons to get to some pattern work with linking cubes (kept it in b/c it used the December calendar's color pattern) and some matching number of pennies to a number card. Jimmy is still figuring out the concept of zero. He knows what zero means, but he is still placing the 0 card after 10 instead of before 1. I'm using the countdown method to help him remember - he knows that 0 follows 1 in a countdown. I haven't done math with him yet today (we had visitors this morning, which threw off our schedule), but I'm not worried since we're don't have anywhere near a tight timeline to complete the curriculum.

This week's LotW is J. Jimmy is excited for obvious reasons. He very nearly has the Bible verse memorized (Jesus said to them, "I am the way, the truth, and the life." John 14:6). He practiced writing big J and little j on Tuesday. He needs to smooth out his lines, but they were mostly readable letters. The dot over the little j has improved significantly since he wrote his i's. Jimmy gets very excited when we add a new letter post-it-note (a gift from Grandmom) to his bathroom mirror. I love how his face lights up as he thinks about his progress this year.

Since it is now Advent, I planned to change our music lessons to Christmas music. Well, both boys are going to be in our church's Christmas Program (a children's choir concert), and they were given CD's of the music they'll be singing. What a perfect fit! They beg to hear Pastor Jeff's CD. It's so much fun to hear them try to sing along. I'm nervous about the concert, tho... both of them tend to be hams. It's cute, of course, but I'm getting to be known as the mom of the scene stealers. Sigh.