Our Day

We started off with our reading program. It was so much better this time than last time. THANK GOD!!! She did really well and only gave me flak a couple of times. 

I wanted her to start tracing her name so I made a sheet with her name written in bold, big letters and made it light gray (couldn't do broken lines).

Then she copied. I could not believe how well she did. She has absolutely no practice with tracing and she did great. I did hand-over-hand for the first letter and she did the rest on her own. WOW!

I made this last night. I wanted to work on name recognition in a fun way. I just wrote her name in the top half of the egg carton and she matched her magnetic letters to the written letters. Then I had her spell her name.

I bought this game for Maggie's 3rd birthday. It's pretty simple. She is really just trying to figure out how to actually play a game (taking turns, understanding the various rules) so she didn't really get the concept of winning, although ironically, she did win. There are so many great educational games. I have a pack of cards and I plan on teaching her go fish, war, solitaire. What else?

This is a pattern block template. I did a caterpillar since I couldn't find one of an ant. She was very interested in this. I honestly am not sure what the point of this is but I see them in every Kinder classroom's math center so. . . 

After this we did our yoga video and by we, I mean me. She still isn't too interested but I so want her to do yoga; I think it's the best exercise you can do for your body, your mind, etc. But so far she doesn't like having to do what they do on the screen. So far, my strategy has been to do the video by myself and let her join in as she wants to. Hopefully, she'll continue getting interested and actually do it. If not, eh, at least I get to do yoga every day.

After yoga and lunch we went and visited Aunt Laurie, Ella and Grandpa. The girls are so cute together. We're going back over tomorrow to watch Ella while her Mommy and Daddy go out. We're going to try a carpet picnic-type thing, where we lay down and watch movies. It should be interesting.

Miss Maggie goes to Galveston

We went to Galveston. It was kinda last minute. The people I work for had family coming to town and gave me over a week (paid!) off. So we decided to go down (over?) and visit Mom and Mark. Here's Maggie on the plane. It was her first time on a little plane. We had to get up at 3.30 am to make our flight. Yuck!

Here's Maggie playing Gran's new violin.

Here's Maggie and Gran playing with a hanger and the Towel of Doom. So cute. Maggie turned to me and asked, "Mommy, hold my baby so I can fight Gran?"

I tried to get pictures of our boat ride but it didn't really work out so well. We saw dolphins. We saw a mommy and two babies AND two boys and a girl uh, mating. Who knew?

What we did. . .

This is actually from yesterday but calendar time doesn't vary much. We go over the month and date and days, count, do the weather and sing songs. I love calendar time because it hits so many areas. We are learning calendar skills and terminology (yesterday, tomorrow, the months and days of the week). We count to figure out what date today is. We talk about the two kinds of weather (what it feels like and what it looks like). It's quite fun.

After calendar we played outside with sidewalk chalk for a while. We sat right by the door where there was a tiny bit of shade. It was so hot. Maggie doesn't like it much because she thinks she can't do it "right." I hate that but I'm not sure how to convince her there is no right or perfect and she has to keep trying.

Below is our fine motor time. I put a lot of shaving cream in a pan and she spread it out and played with it. She was supposed to draw shapes/letters/numbers but she just kinda spread everything out. She did use a paintbrush at one point so I guess that works.

Here is our first math lesson. I made those cards last night. I just wrote a number and drew a corresponding number of dots, then laminated the cards. Since we are learning about ants in science, I had her put little plastic ants on each dot and then count them all. She also identified each number as she picked her card.

Here is our second math time. I just made colored squares on the carpet with electrical tape and she sorted bears and blocks by color.

This is from science. We read an insect book, sang some songs about insects and ants. Then we looked up pictures of ants on google images and talked about the 3 parts of the ants. She was really interested in the pictures and also got a great lesson in using the touch pad thing on my Mac. Then we made our own ant hill. It's just crumbled graham crackers, pudding and raisins. Her favorite part was definitely eating it.

For Social Studies we read "Owl Babies" and then re-created the front cover. We put a branch on and I drew the outlines of the owls. I had her paint with a pom pom to try and get some texture but that didn't really happen. She used the pom pom but she mostly just rubbed. She pretty much did whatever and I tried to keep my OCD-it-must-be-perfect-crazy on the inside.

Here is our sensory bin for this week. It's just dry beans and ants but she loves it. She played with it for over an hour, maybe more.

I don't have any pictures of our reading times. The first thing is from the Before Five in a Row curriculum. We are reading Jesse Bear, what will you wear this week. The idea is that you read the book for 5 consecutive days and do an activity each day to go along with the book. I'm really not sure I like it. It's just so simple but I know she loves books so perhaps it's a good way to get in more stories.

We also are doing a phonics-based reading program. OMG! She didn't get it at all. But I had made up my mind this was something she had to do. We definitely had a power struggle but we got through. Once she understands the format better, she'll be fine. She knows the information. The thing is the program is SRA (a curriculum), which I used when I taught and it's amazing. I taught all my kids how to read using this program and it's just awesome.