Tuesday, May 20, 2008

Today was not a great day.

Aidan is teething and not sleeping well. Isabel fell out of her bed in the middle of the night last night and then re-woke about 90 minutes later to go to the bathroom and generally putz around in middle-of-the-night misery. I am not sleeping because Aidan is not sleeping. We all had a bad case of the crankies. I am glad to see this day end.

We did a very small amount of desk work today, working on letters A and E. I'd thought about doing some handwriting practice but given the universal foul moods in the house, decided we'd be better served by something using more modes of learning, so as to be more all-around interesting. So instead, we recited the first two verses of a short-vowel sound poem, sang our Old MacDonald vowel song, and started working on a self-made primer Isabel titled "The Five Vowels." The first two pages are narration pages - Isabel recited the vowels for me and I wrote them as she said them, and then (on the second page) she explained - correctly! - what makes vowels special and different from other letters. The next two sections are for vowels A and E - we wrote the poem we're learning, thought up short-vowel sound words for each letter and then Isabel drew pictures for each ("Oh no!" she howled while drawing her A page. "I counted wrong and my alligator has EIGHT legs!" I assured her that it was fine.).

After some lunch and general down/play-time, we sat on the floor and looked at a book about mammals. Aidan thinks he's very clever - he sits on the book and we have to slide it out from under him. We talked about the different classifications of mammals, including monotremes (mammals that lay eggs), a group of mammals I'd been neglecting until now because Isabel was really struggling with the whole mammals with fur/birds with feathers issue. I didn't want to introduce egg-laying mammals until she had grasped more fully that birds are not mammals. I'd been avoiding bats (wings are something she associates with birds) for the same reason - we did cover them today. Luckily, the birds/mammals confusion seems largely resolved and after a host of questions about mammals laying eggs, she accepted monotremes and we moved on. We learned that mammals have lower jaws that are one bone (something I hadn't known, either), and we felt each others' jaws to figure out what that bone must look like ("kind of like a 'c', but longer," she said). Isabel is particularly intrigued by marsupials and asked to go to the zoo to see kangaroos soon.

Aidan's big achievement was that he learned where Mama's nose is. He is very proud and expects lots of cheering whenever he shows me.

Today was Irish dancing class as well. The children in this class all seem very nice and Isabel enjoys it.

At dinnertime Isabel thought of some more short vowel E words to add to her book, which I did promptly. We looked at one of her mammal books (in addition to fun reading) before bed and then I left it in the pile of books in her room (she is allowed to look at books in bed at night if she's not tired yet). About 10 minutes later she got out of bed to bring the mammal book downstairs - she was looking at the Orca and wanted to know what the big, top fin is called. Nick told her it's the dorsal fin and she immediately wanted to know what it does. We will look it up in the morning - Isabel had us put the book next to the computer so we don't forget.