School Days - Thursday (1/22/15)

Today we were pretty busy. So busy in fact that I actually wasn't prepared to move further ahead...ugh! I knew I hadn't planned enough for the day. I should always plan as if Swiper is going to be napping the whole time, just in case. He went right to sleep about 20 minutes in and woke up about 30 minutes before it was over. I was finishing up my last presentation with the last kid.

Anyway, here we go:

Swiper has been handing things to us since yesterday. He hands it to me and then waits for me to give it back. He did this with just about all the puzzle word packets.

Here MJ is working on sculpting...

...this. It is a gem. Dad has been reading The Squire and the Scroll to the kids for about 5 nights in a row. He got the idea from that book.

Cat worked on the large bead frame again. She worked on making numbers up to the 100,000s place with a little help from Elsa. She has no skirt on because the girls were so excited that she had a "bathing suit" under her dress.

Here, Tes is practicing on the chalkboards again. And of course Tes needed a little help as well from Anna. Also in her "bathing suit". These were her last letters for this chalkboard. We are moving on to letters with "tails" on another chalkboard next week. By the way, we don't do school on Fridays for right now. At least not until Swiper is a bit older.

She always wants to pose! And yes, her hair is a hot mess! It's pretty much out of bed, into clothes and down for breakfast. We're working on fitting the hair in.

Cat asked me to take this one :).

And this one :).

Here Cat is working on noun work from the elementary albums. We went over an oral noun presentation before Christmas, so we reviewed what nouns are and then verbally listed different nouns in different categories (clothes, foods, etc...). Then she wrote a list of nouns in one category of her choosing. She thought of the noun and I spelled it out for her on the paper to her left.

Tes worked on the formation of numbers again. We did 4 digits today with some zeros in there. I had to finish presenting something to MJ so I asked Cat to continue with Tes. 

This is pretty much what I got. She did help a bit with like one number, and then they got into a fight. Cat laid the "90" card on the tray and Tes got 60 (the card was upside down to Tes). When Cat counted them out to verify, she said Tes was wrong and Tes yelled at her that she tricked her on purpose. Then Cat screamed at her and said she wasn't helping anymore. It was cute, funny and sad all at the same time. I helped them out and they made up.

This is what I was trying to do with MJ during the fiasco. Puzzle words. He's been doing good with his assigned daily reading of Wild Boy. I was helping him the other day and realized there were several puzzle words in the book that he just couldn't get down. So we practiced those today as well as an extra puzzle packet. At least 3 words from the extra packet were in today's page of reading for him. He was excited that he knew them!

Swiper was asleep up to this point.

Rise and shine!

We got the cards picked up just in time, but he was still eyeing the beads.

Already trying to make phone calls.

MJ checking out the flooded creek. It rained pretty much all day. The kids gravitate to this window every 10 minutes or so. I think he was trying to see if the crane was out there.

Swiper actually gets a tad bit of formal Montessori for infancy. He has been putting the ball into the hole lately. He only does it a few times and then starts chasing the ball around like a cat. 

And here they are celebrating. So very unMontessori of them :).

And now it's a walker...er, a kneeler? He pushed it all the way to the other side of the room. I totally should have rotated this picture but I forgot and my computer is way too slow to go back and do it and upload it again. So it's sideways.

MJ worked on grammar box 4 today and we went over permutations. We moved the verb around to see how silly the sentences sound. "your hair comb" or "your comb hair". He thought that was pretty funny. When we were done he finished the filler box for this work. The grammar box is the wooden tray/box that holds sentence cards and all the words in the sentence for the child to rebuild. Each word is in a corresponding section of the tray/box for it's part of speech. This box has the article, noun, adjective and verb. The sentences are commands so the child has something to do or act out. This is how you know they are actually reading.

Tes checking out the creek.

She was drawing a picture of something outside and got sidetracked with practicing her drawings of Swiper. 

At one point she started crying and asked me to draw Swiper for her because she draws him "too fat". I told her he was fat and it was ok. She moved on.

Where did he go?

There he is!

MJ gets really, like REALLY, sidetracked or distracted (whatever you want to call it) when he works on anything having to do with reading. I was talking to him about something he needed to be doing and he was in a complete daze, just staring off passed me. And this is what he was doing as I was talking louder and louder, completely ignoring me.

Tada! Not sure what that is but the girls enjoyed it.

I got a little laugh out of it too before I got back on his case about focusing. It was pretty funny. 

Here he is back to work. The sentence said to scratch the table. He can read! I knew it!

I just wanted to share that we have been listening to these CDs since Christmas time here in the classroom. The kids love them. They are from Classical Kids. They also have audio stories that contain music from specific composers. We have them but haven't listened to them yet. We are enjoying the music so far.

Well that was long. I'll probably start posting twice a week since most of these pics look the same as yesterdays and the day before. They generally work on the same things for a few days before moving on. I'll probably post next week unless I find something interesting to post tomorrow :). Have a good weekend!

Jenn