Today's recap will be largely pictorial because I am exhausted for some reason. School got started on time this morning, and we said our pledge and started off the day's lessons with a short discussion of the words 'pledge' and 'allegiance'. It went fairly well. They're still struggling with allegiance, but the more we use it in sentences the more they're getting it. After the pledge, we decided to take a look at maps for a while. I used Google again, showing them both an overhead view of the state between our current residence and our new house. We then used the maps function to map out the drive between the two places, and followed the road at fairly high resolution, so they could see exactly where they were going. It was rather neat, and they seemed to enjoy it.
After we'd finished up with that, we settled down into math. Yesterday was heavy on the language arts, so today was more math oriented. They started out by using a "color by number" math problem sheet that we found for them online. Each section of the picture had a single digit math problem, and the answer led you to the correct color in the key at the bottom. They had so much fun doing that! They did the math portion first, and then went on to the coloring (after I'd checked their math facts).
As you can see, there was a frog picture and one of a flower and sun. Their math facts were spot on, and I was very proud of them. I didn't give them a number line or a graph to use, so they had to resort to counting up using their fingers.
Kayla was exceptionally proud of her flower picture, and so was I. The math questions were not easy ones for her, and it took her a bit of working on it to finish it up.
Mike showed off his picture, too. He had less problems with the math than she did, but had to have several of his numbers turned around (they're both writing some numbers and letters backward, inconsistently).
This is the home school station, where I pull up information and games, and get many of my ideas from. The children enjoy seeing themselves on the blog, and so I have been trying to take a lot of pictures as we go along.
After the coloring activity, we proceeded to do a measuring booklet. Kayla did the "measuring things around your house" book, while Mike chose to "measure me!" (well, himself actually). His was relatively simple, and he caught on very quickly with how to use the tape measure. Kayla got the more difficult one, and it asked for length, width, and perimeter of each object (though it stuck to largely rectangular objects). I was incredibly proud when Kayla figured out that you didn't have to physically measure all four sides of each item. She told me to just add up the length twice and the width twice and then add them together to figure out the perimeter! I did the writing for the larger numbers, but she did all the adding of the columns (I helped with "carrying the tens" and such, a concept that she's not quite ready for yet).
Because there was only one tape measure, while one child was measuring, I took the other aside and we read our "kindergarten level" books. They both did very well, although Kayla was a bit resistant to reading out loud. She refuses to look at the words, choosing instead to guess them from the images. I had to really work to keep her attention on the book itself.
Last night we had an applesauce explosion that required me to make a trip to the laundromat. I decided to take the kids with me and do our language arts lesson there. We made little word cards of all the kindergarten sight words, and I mixed them up to be random. Then they rolled a die and I shuffled that many words forward. They had to sound out or figure out the word on their own, with no help. If they got it right, they got the slip of paper. If they got it wrong, they both reviewed it and it went back in the pile. We continued this until all the words were answered correctly. They had a blast playing the "game" I'd invented, and they got relatively close numbers correct, although Mike was definitely ahead.
Here are the munchkins at a folding table in the laundromat, working on writing out their alphabet. I wanted them to write out all the capital and lower case letters, plus the numbers 1 through 0, so I could see which letters were getting more reversals. Surprisingly, Mike had a lot more reversals than Kayla did. They both have excellent printing skills for their ages. When they were done with the writing, I set them free to run and play.
Mike chose to climb the poles outside the laundromat, which I found incredibly adorable. Kayla read books and puttered around in the building. They both seemed to have a ton of fun. And now I've uploaded the pics, told the stories, and I think I'll go fall over. I am NOT a natural teacher. LOL!
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