Our Day

Today I thought I'd journal about our day. Currently Tuesdays are our busy learning days. The other two days (when I'm not teaching) are usually interrupted by an activity or two! This is what we did today:

1) Started with simple math drills to wake the brain and encourage speed at easy operations. Subtraction for Mickey, and multiplication for Mason.




2) Mickey practiced her words on this site while Mason worked on his First Language Lessons. We haven't done any work on FLL for quite some time. I actually wasn't sure how much of it was "sticking" and had dropped it for some time. When we picked up from where we left off, he remembered everything. We reviewed nouns; proper and common, and then he copied a poem. In the poem he looked for statements, exclamations and questions. He found the nouns and verbs and we discussed stanzas. He practiced reciting the poem and started working on memorizing it. After, he drew a picture to accompany the poem in his writing journal.




3) Next - on to Money Math. Lately we've been doing money math each day. It helps to reinforce the concepts. They are getting much faster at adding the coins together and can subtract amounts with ease. We will continue with this until June I imagine. This is one of those concepts that kids really need to work on regularly or they soon forget. Kids should be comfortable counting by 1s, 2s, 5s, 10s, and 25s - forwards and backwards to 100. Kids shouldn't really start on money concepts until they can do this comfortably.



4) Playtime - Lego. This has become a daily occurence!



5) Story of the World - Chapter 26
Our history unit has been going slowly. Today we focused on Chapter 26 on The Americas. I tied in discussions on continents, mapping, artifacts, equator, North, Central, and South America. While I read, the kids coloured in the appropriate maps.




6) Art

We have been doing a fairly indepth study of animals. Last week we were learning about birds and other "winged" animals. I came across the book "Wings" by Sneed B. Collard III. I love the illustrations in this books. They remind me of images made solely from pieces of paper. I decided to have the kids make pictures of birds, using only construction paper. This was our first attempt. It's a time consuming process, especially if kids cut out each feather. Each of us attempted this project in a different way. I think we'll probably do this one again. We all really enjoyed it.




Mommy's art:




Mickey's art:



Mason's art: