It's Fire Safety Month

I dubbed yesterday, "Safety Thursday!" Yes, the exclamation point is necessary. We took the day off from reading and writing and the abacus, and spent our time talking about fire safety and how to respond to other emergencies. It was all very exciting.

Isabel army-crawled through the house, slid down the stairs on her bottom, tore her quilt from her bed to jam against the base of her door, learned how to climb over the gate that blocks the kitchen, got to open the front and side doors by herself and run to our "meeting spot!", and practiced calling 9-1-1 (on the dead phone). Oh, and she learned to bring Rosie into the playroom and shut the door as she's speaking to the 9-1-1 operator, so that first responders will actually come into the house. Something about some people being intimidated by a pit bull, blah, blah, blah.

We also learned all about fire; that fire needs oxygen and how depriving it of oxygen makes it go out. We lit candles and put them out, and observed to learn which way smoke travels. Isabel spent all last night and most of today excitedly talking about her newfound emergency knowledge and said to me, at one point this afternoon, "Thanks for teaching me what to do in a 'mergency, Mom!" You're welcome, dear.

Nick worked Sunday, so today was actually our sixth day this week and we didn't do much in the way of schoolwork. While Aidan napped and I cooked noodles for lunch, Isabel came into the kitchen with her princess notepad and a pen, and practiced sounding out and writing words. And she graffitied her name all over my dry erase board, again. Our last name is fairly long, so she's pretty proud to know her whole name. I do wish she'd stop writing it all over my dry erase board, though.

Today was mostly a play day. The kids have been having a lot of fun with the dress up box lately. Rather, Isabel has been having fun dressing up Aidan lately. So, pictures of dress up fun...

Butterfly wings are fun. Isabel flutters her arms and flits about in her wings. Aidan puts his arms out in front of him like Superman and makes airplane noises while he flies:

And, sometimes, dressing up is just learning that you can put your brother in one of your outgrown leotards and knot a ribbon belt around his waist:

"Two Wimmins"

Since Blogger is kind enough to date my posts for me, I've decided it's redundant for me to continue titleing with dates.

Today we met up with the homeschool co-op. Someone scored a huge load of unpainted ceramics off of Freecycle, so everyone brought supplies and the kids painted ceramics. Fun, fun, fun. Isabel did bookends of children in old-fashioned bonnets ("two wimmins," she calls them, not unlike the way my grandpa would say it) and some sort of little planter. She's not so much for the arts, so all three items are a solid, muddy red-brown. She loves them, though, and that's what counts. Or something like that.

Aidan had a blast. He thinks he's a big boy, and so trailed after the real big boys (the young-teen big boys) the entire time. They were playing ping-pong and gave Aidan his own ball and paddle to play with. He felt pretty important, outfitted to play, and made the rounds with his ball and paddle, showing off.

Isabel also played ping-pong and pool and, when the painting was done, most of the families stuck around at the playground outside. Only when it started to rain did we leave, having spent the better part of the day out.

When we got home, we did two worksheets and a new game we're playing - I spell words and Isabel writes down the letters and then sounds them out. D's and B's are a little tricky - I have to help with those sometimes.

It was a good day.

Tuesday, October 7, 2008

Reading and writing and math... oh, my!

Things are going quite well here. Isabel is not reading fluently yet, but is getting proficient with phonics. So three-letter words, look out! Belle can decode you all.

Handwriting is coming along very well, too, although I've noticed that Isabel has some trouble forming certain aspects of letters - specifically, upper-right to bottom-left diagonals. It's extremely subtle, so subtle that if I weren't right with her, watching her actually work the pencil on paper as she tried to form the letters, I probably wouldn't have noticed the pattern. So I've been leading some painting and follow-the-leader activities that simulate this same upper-right to bottom-left diagonal motion and, sure enough, it's a gross motor issue as well as fine motor. If we had the child in activities that used her arms as well as her legs, we probably would have noticed it sooner. Well, not true - it hasn't proven to be an issue in gymnastics, and they do use their arms in gymnastics. She's the T-Rex of athletes, what with her main outlets being the arm-less soccer and Irish dancing, though, so it's easy to miss arm issues. But, I digress.

Now, when Belle was a baby, she had arm tremors and generalized weakness until she was about 8 months old. It was the only holdover from her brain hemmorhage. Those issues seemingly resolved, but now I'm noticing this difficulty with the diagonals. I think it's most likely related. We have a neurology follow up in the next few weeks and I'm going to bring it up to Dr. K- and request a developmental evaluation. I don't think this is a major issue, but I want to work on it. We should probably also check to see if she has adequate arm strength, too, since that was a problem in her infancy. Still, not too shabby for a kid who's missing nearly half of her frontal lobe.

Math has been fun here lately. We bought an abacus and are working sums like crazy. The abacus seems to 'click' for Isabel in a way that the Cuisenaire Rods haven't. We still use the rods and like them, and they're really useful for demonstrating concepts, but Isabel likes the abacus more.

We've also been doing reviews of basic concepts - shapes, colors, tracing, cutting and pasting, etc. Blah. It's boring, but necessary. Belle doesn't find it boring, so that's good.

Our other maqjor topic right now is reptiles/lizards. This month's science group was on frogs, and that was very fun. The kids loved watching the frog eat. I'll be hitting the zoo and science museum with the kids in the next couple of weeks, to learn more about reptiles and lizards.

Friday, September Whatever-It-Was, 2008

Yesterday. We looked at a pinecone and discovered how it spreads seeds to make new trees. We reviewed the usual stuff.

I was up until 3:30 am writing the last chapter of a 72,000+-word novel, so forgive my brevity here. I'm tapped out.

Thursday, September 3, 2008 - Urban Nature Sanctuary

The science museum owns a nature preserve, and that's where Isabel's science program - a hands-on program for kids aged 5-7 - met today. We went for a walk through the preserve (which they call an "urban nature sanctuary" - I don't know why, but that strikes me as funny) and were able to see and touch all kinds of plantlife, and some animals and bugs, too!




Tifft (the preserve) is wonderful. It's right in the city, but when you get in on the trails, it feels like you're a million miles away. We saw a family of egrets in one of the small lakes that dot the preserve, on our way out. Isabel loved watching them - we saw one fly away, and the others were fishing.







The paths go through forest and wetlands. In the wetlands area, a system of raised platforms allow visitors to walk over the water - we looked over the railings and watched frogs and turtles in the water. The frogs blend so perfectly with the surrounding water plants that staring right at one, you would be lucky to see it. We found several bullfrogs submerged, just their eyes peering up over the surface of the water. Dragonflies were everywhere. And the cattails grow so tall, they're all you can see in every direction.

The class instructor, Miss Meghan (who is just fantastic - we love her), pulled a cattail flower and let all the children rub it, to feel how fuzzy it is. Then she opened it up and showed us the seeds inside, which look very much like dandelion seeds. This fit very well with the seed project Isabel and I worked on yesterday. She showed us how the wind carries the seeds, and the seeds will land and sprout new cattails.

We also found a very neat nest of tent caterpillars. There were dozens - maybe even hundreds - of caterpillars wriggling around in the nest.

Evidence of beavers was everywhere, too. We saw a dam, some trees that have been downed by beavers, and a beaver lodge.

It was a fun time. We all went, so it was a nice family outing, as well. We plan to go again.


And now, we must examine ourselves for ticks before turning in for the night.

Wednesday, Sept. 3, 2008

Today was not nearly as busy as yesterday... we started with a walk outside, where we found some maple seeds (helicopters!) and leaves, and some fluffy and yellow dandelions.

Back home, we went over our address and phone number, and Isabel practiced writing her name. Then handwriting - we're on Starting Corner capitals right now (from Handwriting Without Tears) and worked primarily on "L", though we also reviewed several of the Frog Jump capitals. Isabel's handwriting is really coming along nicely.

We went back to vowel sound practice today, because the short vowel sound of "I" is still really tricky for her (odd, because it starts her name...). I think she's getting it now, though. We read a few practice sentences and I notice that the phonemic blending is beginning to take off as well. The issue we battle right now is Isabel's tendency to insert additional sounds, like sounding out i-s, and ending up with "its" instead of "is". In the process of blending her sounds, she often adds stops that are unecessary and lead her to add new phonemes to the word. This is a problem with "R" words, too, as another example - "red" becomes "ered".

I wanted to save the seeds for last, but Isabel was itching to get on them, so we moved on to our seed project. I wanted to just make a poster, but she decided she wanted to make a BOOK. We compromised on making several posters to cover different stages of the plant life cycle, which we'll then bind into a book. For today, we made a poster about seeds. Isabel sounded out and wrote "SEEDS", and drew a picture of seeds in the ground. She correctly identified the three things seeds need to grow (soil, water, sun) and we discovered how seeds are spread by examining the dandelion and maple seeds, and blowing them with our mouths and a hairdryer (um, they go really far this way). We discovered how the two seeds, even though they look very different, share the same structures. Isabel taped the seeds to the poster, along with what they will grow into (we used a leaf for the maple, no room to tape a tree to the page).

We ended our schoolwork today with two math worksheets from the Miquon orange book. Numbers are starting to make more sense to Isabel now, something I'm pleased to see. One of the worksheets had four rows, each with four boxes. Each box had ten shapes. In some of the boxes, a certain number of the shapes would be colored in - in that case, Isabel had to write that number (say, 7) in the box. In other cases, the number would be written, and Isabel would have to color in the appropriate number of shapes. But yet, in OTHER cases, the box would be blank, with no shapes colored in. And Isabel would have to predict what number SHOULD be in that box, based on the numbers elsewhere in the row. I thought this concept would be too advanced for her, but she actually got it. She further surprised me by correctly grasping that "0" meant coloring in NO shapes. She did very well. Then she built a fort with the Cuisenaire Rods. I guess that's what "fun with math" means.

Tuesday, Sept. 2, 2008 (We're back!)

So, I got lazy over the summer. With the blog, that is. We were actually so busy I'm amazed I remembered to breathe, much less feed and clothe myself and two children. And although we kept up a basic level of schoolwork over the past few months, I didn't impose any sort of structured routine. When all the summer activities finished up, we earmarked today as the day to get back into a routine and kick off a new year.

Prep work for Kindergarten is pretty minimal, really. I printed off my list of NYS learning standards for K, and was pleasantly surprised to find that we covered most of them last year. This is good, as I was hoping to really focus on literacy and numeracy this year. Isabel is enrolled in a program at the local science museum, to augment our science studies, and I'm using those classes as a guide to other science activities at home. And so, it was with this guidance that we launched a unit on plants today.

We spent the morning and early afternoon at the Botanical Garden. We had an absolute blast. And we learned stuff, too. Isabel completed a scavenger hunt, finding flowers, plants and other items from throughout the gardens. We also reviewed the five senses and figured out which senses we could use in a plant/flower investigation; then, as we proceeded through various garden rooms, Isabel selected a plant or flower and used her senses to investigate it. We decided that taste probably wasn't a good sense to use for investigation plants and flowers, and I was ready to dismiss hearing, too, but Isabel thought we should use it. So in each space, we touched, smelled, looked and listened to the plants she selected. The palm tree was "REALLY huge!" and rough, and the magnolia smelled sweet. We watched koi in the koi pond and found a bunch of dinosaur topiaries - this was fun because we did a lot of reading about dinosaurs last month. Isabel was nervous in the cactus room when I explained that we can't touch the plants, but we rubbed the dirt in which the cactuses grow.

Once we'd made our way through the gardens, we headed outside to the childrens' garden. Both Isabel and Aidan had a great time playing. Isabel loved the water pumps, and Aidan enjoyed the sand pit. We looked at the flowers and other plants growing outside, as well. When we left, the children were wet and filthy, but happy.

Back home, we practiced writing Isabel's name, reviewed letter sounds and completed two worksheets (one on shape matching and another maze-type sheet for motor skills).

Some more pictures of our time at the Botanical Garden: