Animals Unit Study

Today we started the Animals unit study. Today's animal was sheep and we learned about David the Shepherd, what shepherds do, and interesting things about sheep. DD5 loves animals, so I am thinking that maybe we will go more in depth on this study. I can get books about animals from the library. Also, maybe we will do an animal lapbook. It would be a fun way to emphasize our phonics lessons in addition to learning about animals. DD5 also has a favorite computer game: Jumpstart Animal Field Trip (you should hear her belt out the bat "echolocation" song, LOL). Today we learned the letter "m", and added to our expanding vocabulary (tim, kim, mill, met, mug, etc.) I don't spend a lot of time on letter sounds because DD5 knows them well. Today I used our chalk board from Handwriting Without Tears. I turned it on its side and drew a dotted line. This actually worked really well for handwriting. I loved using the chalk board for HWT, but couldn't figure out how to use it once we did lower case letters. Turning it on its side worked brilliantly.

In Math, we are counting to 60 (still...DD5 wants to go to 100). Today we studied 36-39 (how to write it, etc.) We are using unifix cubes on our Tens / Ones chart. I dropped 36 cubes all in the Ones column. DD5 puts them together in groups of ten & puts them in the Tens column. We count the Tens (3 sets), and count the ones (6). We put our number 3 card on the Tens column, and our 6 card on the Ones column and read it as 36. DD5 seems to still have trouble reading the numbers - if I show her 34, for example, she might call it a twenty. So just today I started asking her how many tens there are (3), and reinforcing the idea that if there are 3 tens, then it is 30. It seems to be making a lot more sense to her, so I think we will see some improvement in identifying numbers over the next week. She is much quicker to get a concept then she is to identify a symbol. Which is probably the point they keep driving home in the Well Trained Mind.

Today I decided to try my schedule (10 mins of personal computer time left according to my schedule, LOL). I scheduled in a preschool time with DD3. So far, the schedule has gone well. If I actually can keep up with the home business, bills, and phone calls, then that will be the real test to the schedule. If it doesn't work, then I'll have to cut out something else & lengthen my bill/phone/business time. We shall see...

For preschool, DD3 & I used counting bears to 10. She skips right over "6". We sorted by color, we played with positions (on, under, in front of, behind). I used BJUP's charts to teach the alphabet song and the letter A. I will stay on A all week. We found things that started with A, and sang about the A sound. Last, I gave her red to finger paint with. She liked that, but doesn't like her hands to be icky for too long.

One more note: We have been reading Mr. Popper's Penguins (thanks for the suggestion, Melanie!) But lately, I don't think DD5 is paying a lot of attention to it. She is too busy finding all the words she knows how to read on the page! So we end up stopping in the middle while she shows me the words she knows (there are a lot of "the" in MPP, LOL). I'm very encouraged by this, and hope that she continues to find the words that she knows, and that the list of words grows.