Three. Five. One.

Well, vacation is over and we are back into the swing of things. Babe was a bit rusty so we spent the first hour of the day reviewing all Math and English. When I felt she was comfortable enough to move on, we jumped into Math with learning about halves, and cutting things into two equal parts.

I first asked her to build a tower 10 blocks high. Then I asked her to cut it in half so each part is equal. She had a very interesting way of doing this. It was almost like she estimated in her head what half would be, then counted out her estimation, and when she got to her estimate, she started counting at number one again to see if, when she got to the end of the tower, she ended with the same number.

Did that make sense? It made complete sense to her, and actually, her way worked very well!

I had her do this same thing for numbers 14 and 6, so she could get the hang of cutting in half. Again, she did really well using her method. To end this lesson, I had her build a tower 9 blocks high, then asked her to cut it in half.

After using her method only a couple of times, she knew that this number could not be cut into two equal parts. She was confident in her answer, so I (very) briefly introduced to her the concept of odd and even numbers.

For this, I brought out the number line and put a yellow dog on the numbers she already worked with that could be cut into two equal parts. I then put a red dog on the number 9, since it could not be cut into two equal parts. I then had her start with number 1, asking her if she could cut each tower into two equal parts. She did the first few and immediately noticed the pattern.

"I'm making an AB pattern!"

With that, I introduced the terms "even" and "odd." I told her that even numbers were the yellow dogs, the numbers that could be cut into two "even" towers. The red dogs were on the odd numbers, because they could not be cut into two equal parts. She started to understand, so I had her pick any number on the number line and build a tower that many blocks high. Of course she went for the biggest number, 30.

She used her method to figure out if it could be cut into two equal parts. After a few minutes, she put a yellow dog on the number 30.

"30 is an even number! 15 plus 15 is 30! They are two equal parts!"

Amazing.

Worksheets done. Math complete.

Next, I set up an art project and had all the kids sit at the table in front of a large sheet of paper. On their sheet of paper, each corner had a big puddle of paint. I told them that we were going to listen to four different kinds of music - hip hop, jazz, country, and 80s - and when the music played, they were going to let the music guide their hands to make a fun painting.

I've never seen them all have so much fun. I let them get ask messy as they wanted and they were flinging paint everywhere.

While I cleaned up, I let them dance in the living room to their favorite kind of music of the four kinds they painted to.

Their favorite?

The 80s!

After lunch, Babe read "Aaron and Gayla's Alphabet Book" by Eloise Greenfield to kick of Reading Comprehension. In the middle of listing out the verbs in the book, she nearly fell asleep, so I sent her to bed for a bit before heading to dance.

And that was Monday!