entirelysonja

Today we got some magnetic letter tiles in the mail, and it took a while to decide where to use them. The lap-size whiteboards are too small to fit all of the letters. I could fit them on the back of a cookie sheet, but that wasn't really satisfactory either.

( What better time to pull out the full-size whiteboard? )

This is the whiteboard I gave John for our very first Valentine's Day, back in 1989. We took it down when we were rearranging our house pre-baby, so it hasn't been used in more than five years. I guess we need to figure out where to hang it up again now!

The kids and I had fun cleaning the whiteboard and playing with the letters.

Yesterday started off with swimming lessons for both kids, alternating with time at the library. Erika and I began at the library, where we read a book called, "Boy, Were We Wrong About Dinosaurs". Interesting book, and worthwhile for me because so much has changed in the 30 or so years since I last knew very much about dinosaurs.

Erika really impressed me at swimming. She's taking a course called "Pre-Beginner 3," which is the first class where they really learn independent swimming and work in water too deep for the kids to stand on the bottom. It was the third session, and in the previous two, they'd been working on the basic crawl. Erika was doing pretty well with it, managing to propel herself forward in a reasonably straight line more or less on the surface of the water. Then yesterday, the teacher introduced swimming on one's back. Erika took to that very well, and seemed to be having a great time. I was amazed watching her swim back and forth on her back, without any help from the teacher. At the end, Erika told me she'd enjoyed swimming because she was able to do everything. This was a far cry from five minutes before swimming started, when she told me that she didn't like anything about swim lessons and they weren't fun.

In the afternoon, we went down to the National Gallery of Art, where we looked at some impressionist paintings. Erika and I had read about Van Gogh in the Usborne Book of Famous Paintings, so we made it a special point to see a couple of his paintings, and happened upon a self-portrait of Paul Gauguin. We also looked at some Monet, Renoir, and Cassatt before the kids ran out of steam.

Continuing in the art theme, this morning John and Erika stumbled into doing some shared art. They did a series of crayon drawings of the seasons, taking turns adding elements to the pictures. Erika also drew a picture of a carnivorous dinosaur.

I had always planned to do Miquon math with Erika, I just got caught a little short when she suddenly decided she wanted to do math lessons this year. I had the main teacher's guide (the "Lab Sheet Annotations") and the First Grade Diary, which explains how math was actually implemented in the Miquon school. I'd even read the First Grade Diary and parts of the Lab Sheet Annotations. What I didn't have was any of the actual Lab Sheets!

After Erika's math obsession had gone on for a couple of weeks, I ordered the Miquon "Orange Book," and today we did the first two sheets. It was easy material for her, and I think I'm going to omit a few pages to get to something with a little more challenge. I'll be interested to see what she thinks of Miquon as we move on with it. I also introduced the concept of putting your name and the date onto the lab sheets today.

We also did more MEP today, wrapping up the end of Lesson Plan 19 and moving on into Lesson Plan 21. (Every tenth lesson doesn't really exist, it's intended for consolidation and review in the classroom.) ( A few pictures )

Erika was not really "getting" the less than or equals sign and the greater than or equals sign, plus she was unenthused about subtraction, so I decided today to make it more fun with some M & M's.

I put M & M's on each side of a symbol, and asked her to take away M & M's (eating the ones that were taken away) in ways that preserved the correctness of th mathematical expression. Well, what I actually said was more like, "Ok, now where can you take away an M & M and still have it be right?"

( Picture of M & M lesson )

By the end of several exercises like this, I think she had a pretty good grasp of the "greater than or equals" and "less than or equals" signs.

We also did a bunch of subtraction problems, which was indeed made considerably more fun by being allowed to eat the M & M's that were subtracted.

After we spent some time on M & M math, we did a bunch of other stuff, including having her complete patterns like "1, 3, 5, ..." and "10, 8, 6, ..." orally, without me telling her what the pattern was. All in all, a very good day of math.

This morning the kids decided to "play school" and told us they were "math kids." Karl even had to put his backpack on to go to school. Aww...

Later, we worked on lesson plan 6 from MEP Year 1. I involved both of the kids in an exercise where we threw balls back and forth and shouted out opposites (tall/short, left/right, up/down, etc.). Then when Karl was napping, Erika and I did most of the rest of the lesson. It took a really long time because we went off on some tangents, which I thought was fine. After all, part of what drew me to homeschooling in the first place was the idea that it would be possible to spend more time on whatever interested the kids, instead of being constrained by predefined time blocks.

One of the exercises involved drawing a figure like this:

            *
         *
      *     *
   *     *
*     *     *
   *     *
      *     *
         *
            *

The idea was to then count the number of dots in each column. Which was all well and good, but then, at my suggestion, we spent some time drawing lines between the dots to make triangles. Erika then also drew a second collection of dots for us to make triangles out of.

Another activity involved drawing a ladder and labeling each rung with a numeral from 1-10, so we could count up, count down, and count by 2's. Erika decided to augment the ladder by adding 11 and 12 to the top of it, and putting the corresponding number of dots next to each numeral.

I just decided to sign Erika up for the Time4Learning site. She seems bored with preschool online stuff, and thought the demo activities were fun. We'll see how it goes!

We've been playing a lot of board games lately -- Gobblet Jr., Set, and Uno are the favorites right now. Erika also recently did a moderately complicated maze in her head before setting pen to paper, instead of trying out different routes with the pen. We thought that was pretty cool! There are constantly new developments in her drawings; last week, she drew a picture of a house where she left the clouds un-colored-in and colored the sky blue; it's the first time I've seen her take advantage of the color of the paper as part of the artwork.

She can read all of the Bob Books in the first two Costco collections (goes up through the end of "Bob Books Set 3"); I haven't given her the third collection yet, because I thought she needed time for the stuff she learned in the first 2 collections to really sink in.

Her German has been really taking off in the last few months; she now initiates conversations with me in German quite often. Yay!

Erika had been using an online reading system called Reading Eggs in the spring, and was pretty enamored of it. But it got to the point where it was hard for her, and she wasn't interested in going back and doing some of the previous exercises again to solidify her grasp on the earlier material, so she didn't do much with it over the summer. She was stuck on an exercise that required you to read a certain number of words in a 2-minute period and click on the corresponding picture from a grid of 16 or so choices. She really dislikes timed exercises, and hadn't much liked being put on the spot anyway. What she really wanted was for me to do it for her, but although I'm willing to give her some help with Reading Eggs, I felt like this was an exercise she really just needed to be able to pass on her own.

So she took a hiatus from Reading Eggs. In the intervening time, we've been reading the Beginner Phonics books from Progressive Phonics and playing the associated memory games. She's also been working her way through the first box of BOB books we bought at Costco a few weeks ago ("Collection 1") and has gotten through 12 of them. During this time, she's also gotten a lot more "teachable" -- she previously seemed to feel like she ought to know everything without any help.

Anyway, today she went back to Reading Eggs, and after needing a little encouragement to get through that first exercise in egg 70, she flew through the rest of the egg, which required genuine reading on her part, and easily passed the quiz at the end of map 7. Yay, Erika!

I bought some used Cuisenaire Rods to go along with my Miquon math materials. Even though I'm not planning to use the Miquon materials yet, I wanted to get some Cuisenaire Rods so I could do some of the exercises myself and figure out how many of them we needed.

Just from giving the kids the opportunity to play with them once, I can see that I need a lot more!

( Picture of kids playing with Cuisenaire Rods )

I also got the "First Grade Diary" yesterday, which gives the experiences of the developers of the Miquon Math program teaching first grade one year. It's very helpful, and makes clear that the kids in the Miquon school had access to LOTS of Cuisenaire rods during their frequent free play sessions.

This afternoon Erika suggested that we read part of book 3 from Progressive Phonics. After she was done with that, she wanted to play the short "i" sound memory game, which we hadn't done before.

When she counted up her cards at the end, she told me she had 11. I told her that wasn't one of the possibilities, that it had to be either 10 or 12. Since I've been reading the Miquon Lab Sheet Annotations, I thought it might be a good chance to show her a number line, so I asked her if she'd like to see how I knew she couldn't have 11 cards. She was interested, so I drew a number line on a piece of paper and we talked about it a bit. ( Picture of number line )

Then we played a game of Set, and did a number line for that at the end also. Since each set is 3 cards, this time we got to hop by threes. ( Picture of second number line )

A few days ago, I heard about a free reading program called Progressive Phonics, and thought it might interest Erika. One of the features that distinguishes it from other programs is that, although it does teach the phonics rules, it emphasizes the acquisition of sight words. Since I believe that true reading is done by sight words, this appealed to me. Also, one of its main teaching methods, at least in the early levels, is through the reading of amusing stories where the parent reads most of the words, and the child reads only a few words on the page. This allows the stories to be more interesting, and creates a fun atmosphere of reading together. Erika really likes the kind of story where the adult reads most of the words, but the child "reads" pictures representing some of the nouns, so I thought she might enjoy this kind of collaborative reading.

She enjoyed reading the first book together, but what she really loves is the associated card game. The program comes with a lot of worksheets and other materials to go with each book; in this case, there was a memory game featuring 9 high-frequency words with the "short a" vowel. I enjoyed printing up and laminating the cards, and we've played twice now. She clearly reads all of the words well, and I'm pretty sure she didn't know some of them before we read the book. One of the things I love about memory is that it's possible for me to play together with Erika and have her win; of the 8 times we've played, I think she's won about half the time, including one game in which I got no pairs.

( pictures of the game )

I'm not entirely convinced that I ought to be doing this kind of thing with Erika at her age, but I think I've decided that as long as we're both having fun and I don't have any expectations of how often she'll want to do it or what kind of progress she might make, it's OK.