Three. Four. One.

Thanksgiving week means no dance, which means so. much. work. But even though we got so much work done today, Babe learned so much and we had a lot of fun. Throughout the day I thought of new ideas to incorporate into the lessons on the fly, and they all worked out great. It was a very relaxing, but very productive day. I love those kinds of days.

We started off with Math, as usual, and I brought out the homemade scale from the first days of Kindergarten. We worked with the terms heavier and lighter, and I had Babe compare the weight of random items. I gave her a heavy shell and had her put it in one of the cups. Then I asked her to figure out how many dog manipulatives it would take to be the same weight as the shell. We did this activity for a few different items. She's really good at reading the scale!

After Math, I gathered the kids on the couch to read "The Littlest Pilgrim" by Brandi Dougherty to them. Such a cute book! The illustrations were just so adorable. After I read it, I told Babe that back when the Pilgrims were here, the Pilgrim children all attended the same school, all in the same classroom. I explained to Babe that if she was back in those times, she'd be in the same class as her cousins, who range in grades 1st to 9th grade!

"That's a lot of people in one room!"

I then explained, from the Calvert Lesson Manual, that the windows in the schoolhouse were "oiled windows" that helped keep the heat out in the summer, and the cold out in the winter. I told the kids to sit at the table, where I had wax paper and butcher paper set out, with cups of vegetable oil at each. What we did next was kind of a bust, but they all really liked getting messy and sticky. Even Z dove his fingers into the oil.

When they were done spreading the oil onto their paper, I stuck each of their "windows" onto the sliding glass door and had Babe compare if the oiled windows were any different than the window itself. She did notice that the oiled windows were a bit darker, letting less light through. But that was about it with the revelations. It was a very messy project but it was cool watching them get all slimey and having fun. (In the photo, the sheet in the middle is not an oiled window, but a plain sheet of wax paper. The sheets on either end are the oiled windows.)

After I cleaned up the messiness, I had Babe read a book before I prepared lunch.

This book. Is adorable. I had Babe read it twice through because she struggled with it the first time, but after the second time, her comprehension was spot on. After the last page, she recalled the whole book AGAIN, in perfect order of how the leaf affected each animal on the farm. I had goosebumps the whole time. Amazing.

After lunch, I brought this book out again and thought of an exercise for reviewing nouns and verbs. Babe remembered what a verb and what a noun was, so I had her turn to each page and tell me the nouns and the verbs she saw. Sometimes she would get confused though.

"Cow is the verb on this page."

"OK, now, I want you to stand up and show me how you cow."

She got the biggest grin on her face.

"I mean sneeze! Sneeze is the verb on this page!"

"That's right! Show me how you sneeze."

Another one of my favorite mess-ups was when she said goat was a verb.

"Show me how you goat."

She laughed so hard. She looked at the page again and found the right word.

"Kicked! Kicked is the verb. Goat is the noun."

By the end of the book, she was getting them all right. It was really cool to see.

After this impromptu lesson, we did a quick Vocab lesson with position words - words she already knows. I didn't linger too long because I had other plans for the day, but it was a quick review and she was fine with it.

Next was her thankfulness lesson, so I handed her another book to read.

I loved this book. It has a perfect rhythm and, again, the illustrations are just too cute. As Babe was writing it in her log, I noticed it was written by the same author as her previous reading log book. I showed Babe and her jaw dropped.

"He wrote TWO books!? Wouldn't that be so cool to write THREE books?!"

After she read this book, I asked her what kinds of things she was thankful for. Then I asked her if she was thankful for any of the same things that the animals in the book were thankful for.

"I am really thankful for my crayons."

Ha!

I then had her draw three things that she was thankful for.

She knows we are going to the dairy farm tomorrow.

I told her I've never seen a better drawing of a dancer. Ever.

She told me she was "just going to draw bread", but then she started cracking up and told me it looked like pancakes instead.

Whatever works.

After her drawings, she did her online lesson on basic graphic designing. Then she did her Checkpoints.

And then we were done with the day! Like I said, we had a lot of extra time, and I filled it to the max. I felt very accomplished!