School Days - Updates for rest of February 2015

Ok so blogging is hard and takes FOR. EVER. Especially if you have small kids. So we've been gone for a month or so and our back to give an update. I can make time for blogging when I take advantage of fast food instead of cooking and cleaning up our mess afterwards! Bam! An extra 3 hours right there :).

Ok so here goes:

The latter half of February went smoothly....I guess, I really don't remember. I have pictures to prove we worked on stuff though!

Here, Tes is working on her hammering. This is definitely practical around here since we are usually trying to make something out of wood.

I guess this is another day since she's wearing a different shirt. For some reason we were going over the sand paper cyphers. I think she chose this work. I turned it into a phone number lesson. We practiced dialing Grandma's number, Daddy's cell phone and Momo's number.

MJ and Cat working together with the phonogram commands. Not really group work but there are enough cards that they can both do them for a while without repeating. This is primary work for practice reading words with familiar phonograms. It also tests reading comprehension since they have to act out the command. This way you know if they read it correctly or not. And of course they can always ask for help if they are unsure of something. Elementary kids wouldn't be working on this, but I allow MJ and Cat to do anything reading-related since they are behind with reading.  They can always use refreshers with phonograms at this point.

Here is Tes's work writing with the moveable alphabet. I was strongly encouraging this because I wanted to get her going with reading, which comes after lots of moveable alphabet practice. This says " (Swiper) went to the pizza place" She wanted to add more but I think Swiper either woke up from a nap or I was trying to put him down for a nap. She won't really do this without me being right next to her. She'll wander off and mess with MJ and Cat when I'm out of the room.

MJ continued working on the large bead frame with long multiplication.

Oh and we finally introduced the Hand Timeline. It is one of the Great Lessons that is basically the backbone of the elementary Montessori class. It is a series of stories about how the world and life came into being. This lesson opens up History, which is the written record of human life on earth. I had written it down on our whiteboard for the kids to put in their journals. I didn't get pictures of it though. Can't remember why. I think I was having a hard time keeping Swiper from messing up the long cloth. You unroll it to show how long people were here before they started writing. The story that goes with this presentation goes into human life and our needs. It naturally flowed into a conversation about the how we meet those Fundamental Needs in our everyday life. 

This is our Fundamental Needs chart. Pictures are provided in Jessica's albums over at Keys of the Universe. I made this last year and presented it to MJ. This is the first time it was presented to Cat.

Here is the Fundamental Needs chart for Food. These images are also provided by Jessica in her albums. It is just an example of how we meet one particular need in the first chart. Cat and MJ decided to create a chart for the needs of Defense.

Here they are cutting the circles. This project was really good for showing me just how much I need to show them...lol. They just started cutting out a bunch of circles. They started to glue some on the board before even deciding what they were going to draw or how many circles they needed. They had not even drawn any sort of graph so they'd know where to place the circles. I had to sit down and have a long discussion about "planning" with them. I helped them to make a list on a separate piece of paper for all their categories of defense, like what kinds of materials they'd use and what kind of weapons they could think of. They worked on this for a few days. It was pretty funny. They had drawn things like blankets (to hide under if a bad guy comes) or poison berries (to poison the bad guy with)...lol. Shows how much tv my kids are exposed to. Or at least how much "bad" tv they are exposed too. The only "real" weapons I saw on their chart were a gun and a spear. I believe electricity was on their as well, because that where you get the news on tornadoes in the area so you can run for you life to save yourself! This experience was definitely an eye opener! We have some thing to discuss!

Here is Tes working with the moveable alphabet again. This was on another day and I was showing her how to space her words with two fingers. I made her practice a few times. I had noticed that she just kept starting new words right at the end of previous ones.

She chose some princess attire for this school period. Tes is 4.5 yrs old and I believe this outfit is a size 2T. It is definitely a favorite!

Swiper is still swiping things from the table from time to time. He really loves chewing on these polymer erasers! He swipes them every chance he gets.

For the past few weeks we'd been listening to this cd. Putumayo Presents has a great variety of music from many different countries. The variety even includes things like children's music and lullabies. I have many of them on my wishlist. Anyway, I had just chosen one at random and purchased it to add some culture into our days. The kids really like this cd. It was played over and over. 

Swiper doing a handwriting lesson :).

Now THOSE are weapons for defense...haha! No more tv for Swiper!