Back to School

After, a week and a half devoted to a garage sale endeavor we are now back to school. We finished our Katie Kazoo book which we started last week. They seem to focus much better on the story when they are coloring while I'm reading. I find that kind of ironic, but I guess it focuses the eyes and leaves the ears and brain open to the story.

We practiced our math by modifying this game http://www.collegehumor.com/video:1830262 We rolled two die and added the numbers together. We then counted out the correct number of beans to represent the answer. When we had ten beans we would trade them in for a manipulative representing ten. (I have foam pieces, strips, and squares representing ones, twos, threes...tens, hundreds, and thousands.) The first on to fifty won.

Casey then made up a game with very subjective and changeable rules which he graciously let me win. Then we changed to a bit to make it more fair and accurate by placing the foam 'tens' strips end to end. We rolled the dice and counted that number of spaces on the strips until we reached the end of our tens road. He won that one. I was impressed that he knew 5+6 immediately even though we've never formally learned that one. He knows what 5+5 is so he correctly deduced that it was one more. A couple of times he 'saw' where he needed to move his piece without counting it out. I'm impressed by his mathematical thinking.

We were practicing our math facts in the car yesterday and I was gratified to hear my dear daughter remembering several math facts we have been working on. I wasn't sure that she was retaining them long term. Yay! My dear husband gave me so good advice about teaching math with several different methods. I could use music, flashcards, games, ect. I thought this was a great idea. We can create several different ways of recalling the facts and we can use methods that will speak to each child's mode of learning.

Aria practiced her nouns and verb with a game on iknowthat.com and Casey practiced 'wh' with Starfall.com.

I'm very depressed because we can't find our digital camera. I love having the things we do recorded that way. It would have been so fun to have it last week when we got out our new microscope and looked at a hair, wasp's wing, and a...booger. :) That particular sample was happily extracted by both older children in record time. lol Well, we'll find it or get a new one for an early Christmas present, I guess.

Feels good to be back together, learning.