School Days - Monday and Tuesday (2/9-10/15)

The first part of this week went decently. I'm finally starting to get into the groove of this "schooling with a baby" thing now. It takes much more planning and preparation to make sure I have everything ready to go in order to pull it off in short instances when he goes down for his cat naps! As long as I have prepared my plans and pulled all the album pages I need, I can just go right to them when I have any spare moment. And every second counts. Literally, every SECOND! :)

Here is what we did:

Monday:

Cat worked with fractions again yesterday. I introduced writing fractions to her. I showed her one example and she labeled one fraction from each set. She had already started putting them away when I took this picture. Sorry it's blurry, I was just trying to hurry....ya know, keeping an eye on Swiper while I do this.

Here she labeled each fraction piece from each set. There is a "1/4" missing. I'm not sure what happened to it. I'll have to make another one.

I was finally able to move on with circle nomenclature in geometry with MJ. We worked on lines in relation to circles. We talked about secant lines, tangent lines and external lines. I plan to finish up the circle work with another presentation on two circles in relation to each other. Very similar to this one.

Here are Cat and Tes working with the story basket. Apparently the actual basket is part of the story as well. I think it's a hill. I would have never thought to use it. Shows how stunted my imagination is. Their's are still fresh!

Tuesday:

MJ finally worked on long multiplication with the large bead frame. Right now I am requiring him to work at least one problem each day until next week. I need to show him the partials presentation and he has to be able to do these entire problems in order to see what the "partial answers" are. He did good today with a little bit of help. I'm pretty sure he'll be able to do it tomorrow with even less help. His problem today was 8283 x 22. He messed up at some point the first time we went through it because when we started to write down the final answer, there were millions beads on the right side that shouldn't have been there. So we started over, this time going a lot faster. It also helped him with his multiplication facts because he was able to remember all the multiplying he had just done without looking at his chart. We keep the multiplication control chart from primary with us for this work since his facts haven't been memorized yet.

Tes working on a stereognostic bag blindfolded. These bags have contents that the child is supposed to feel and then separate in to the two outer dishes. They range from really easy, like a ball and a cube to hard, like a penny and a dime. There are 8 bags in all. I keep these bags in a basket on the shelf. They are all numbered and she picks out random ones each time. I should change out the contents in each bag on a regular basis but I can't find the time to do that. 

Somebody is sleepy but won't go down for a nap. Buster (the stuffed dog) will have to do for now.

Here is Cat writing in her journal. She is writing down the time. Not sure what is going on here. she has an extra "10" over to the left and is writing the time over to the right???  Just thought I'd share that she's at least writing in it.

Ooooh and these got me so excited. These are not the REAL Montessori bells like Abbie's. They are still nicer than the handbells that were here previously. I didn't like that the kids could not play a song on the handbells. You had to pick each one up in order to strike it with the mallet. I found these over at IFIT and they are a fraction of the price of the real thing. It was something I could afford. These bells don't include sharps or flats which is a bummer, but not a deal breaker. I can hold off on introducing sharps and flats until the elementary presentations with the tone bars. As soon as these bells arrived, I set them up in the school room. As soon as MJ saw them, he started trying to figure out how to play Twinkle Twinkle Little Star. He has a good ear, despite not having too much bells experience. He was able to figure out the notes on his own.

Anyway, today I gave the official bells presentation with the mallet and damper. I played up and down the scale for them and had them each try. Then MJ showed everyone that he could play Twinkle Twinkle. I'm glad they are excited to use these. The fact that they are on stands makes such a HUGE difference. Tomorrow I plan to give them the matching presentation and then start playing all the games in the album with them. 

This has been one of Swiper's new games. He squats behind something and then pops up when you say "Where did he go?" I want to eat him up!

Buster got a hold of the bells. I don't remember giving him the presentation.

Ok so I put the bell there (just in case you were wondering) and used this setup to give Tes the presentation on "observing" others. Cat and MJ were working on suffixes together so I needed another body to role play with her. She had to lightly tap him on the shoulder as he was playing the bell and wait for him to respond (I was really responding for him, he's a puppet) and then she asked if she could observe him. He said yes, so she sat quietly with her hands in her lap and watched. The kids were cracking up at my Buster voice. For some reason I hear Buster talking like Yota from Star Wars.

Ok Swiper what are you up to now? I heard something.

Ok he's definitely got a metal inset, but I swear I heard some knocking or banging of solid objects a minute ago...

Aha! Good thing class was over. I had to clean up all his messes! At least we were able to get some learning in, despite Swiper's messes. The kids are pretty good about helping clean up his stuff. Good practical life lessons in working together and helping mom out :).

Jenn