entirelysonja

Erika has played TransAmerica with other people a couple of times, but I played with her for the first time today.

She beat both John and me at the game, and we were playing to win. She read all of the city names herself. I am impressed. Every time Erika learns to play a game, without accommodations, that adults actually find interesting, I am struck again by how much I am enjoying this stage.

In other events of the day, when she was having a total meltdown earlier today, and I asked her what would help, she wanted to watch a nature show on TV -- turned out to be a David Attenborough Wildlife Special about polar bears. I didn't get to see the whole thing, but the part I did see was terrific. They had a camera inside a polar bear den in the winter, so you got to see a tiny little baby polar bear with its mother. I'd never seen that before.

We also talked a bit about the day-to-day routine of we'll be doing in homeschooling when we start up officially in two weeks, and she was excited by the idea of a checklist for the things we'll aim to do during the week. I thought it might be useful for both of us -- for her so she could get some idea of what we're trying to get done, and for me so I would feel accountable for making sure the activities that take more prep work on my part actually happen. My idea is that she could have a fair amount of flexibility about what she wants to do when, something I know is important to her, but with an eye to making sure we more-or-less meet our weekly goals. If that doesn't pan out, we'll re-evaluate.

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 )