MFW 1st - Day 4

Well, skipping the bike ride lets us get started by 9:00a.m. I'd still like it to be earlier than that, but we'll take it.

We did read a Prudence and the Millers story and then went over their Bible verse. That didn't take too long.

Started with Tigger in Reading. Pooh worked on some mazes (okay, he finished those really quickly and decided to sharpen all the pencils in his new pencil box). It took us exactly 20 minutes, and that included doing the scroll page, but not coloring the pictures on the scroll page. So, I had Tigger finish coloring the scroll page and do mazes. It took Pooh 20 minutes to do just the Reading portion, without doing the scroll page. While I was making their morning snack, Pooh worked on his scroll page. It didn't take him that long, though.

After snack, we did Math. What I did to streamlline this was make pages for their Math notebook (a 1-inch 3 ring binder) that has everything I want to cover. So, the first page is just a list of the months of the year and the days of the week. We go through the lists, and ask the before and after questions. Then, the next page is a calendar of the month page. So, we count up to the day, cross out the day, read the date, and the day before and after. The page after that has their name, address, phone number and birthday. So, we just work top to bottom through those things. The next page is a weather dial I made in Photoshop Elements - it has arrows on a brad just like the big one on the wall that they can turn to match the day's weather. The page after that is the weather chart to mark off what the weather. The next page is the 100 Chart, and that's my cue to do the Daily Math Activities. So, we work through those, filling in the 100 Chart when we come to it. After the 100 Chart are the "Number of the Day" pages for them to fill in. So, basically, we can just sit at the little table and do the whole routine together. This takes us about 10-15 minutes right now, depending on which kid. I expect it to speed up a little bit once they can say things themselves instead of repeating after me. Then the next 5 or 10 minutes we spent doing our pattern activity. Today I would write a pattern of numbers on the paper, and then they would continue it. Then they wrote a pattern, and I would continue it. We did that a few times, and then time was up.

We had a little scroll activity today - to make scrolls that fit into our clay jars (or in our case, pots) that we made the other day. I had packing paper from a package that arrived recently that was all scrunched up, so I used some strips from that, cut the ends off of toothpicks and glued them to the ends.

Once they dried, the kids rolled them up like scrolls and put them in their pots.

You know, I had a bunch of Model Magic - that would have been easier to get more of a jar shape with than the homemade clay. Oh well. The kids had fun with it.

Next we did Spanish. We only went for about 10 minutes. The lesson was going to be longer, but I stopped it short as it was time to make lunch.

After lunch we did the first art lesson. The kids actually did pretty well with it. Pooh's left hand isn't very stable, but he was pretty much able to do most of the pictures. Even Rabbit joined us for the art lesson, and she was excited to do it.