4.1.1.

Can you believe it? We are already into the fourth month of home schooling. Crazy. Time is flying by. I mean, it's already December!

Today we did things a bit differently, and depending on how tomorrow goes, I might make it a regular thing. This week, I have Monday and Tuesday - dance days - as complete review days. As in, very little new things will be learned. Since we've been out of sorts the past few days, today she learned a bit of new stuff, but the whole day wasn't completely filling her head with new knowledge.

I still feel the most comfortable with starting the day off with Math, so that's what we did. I first had her cut a sheet of construction paper in half, then asked her how many pieces there were. Then I asked her to cut the paper into fourths, which she did. With ease. I asked her how many pieces of the rectangle there were all together, and she was correct with four. Then I had her take one of the four pieces and cut it in half, just so she could see that halves and fourths come in all sizes. She did so, and then she cut it in fourths.

Next we did some measuring and weighing so Babe could review the different tools used to measure different things like length, height, and weight. She did good with this and kept asking to measure how long different things were. I let her have at it!

Then we went into the bathroom to weigh everyone. I had her guess who would weigh the most and least (Z and I) and then after we weighed everyone, she lined us up heaviest to lightest. Pretty cool!

After that I introduced her to temperature and reading a thermometer. I forgot my real thermometer at home, but I showed her the ones Calvert worksheet and asked her which one showed a cold temperature. She knew! She knew that a high red line meant it was hot, and a low red line meant it was cold. Brilliant!

"It looks like the thermometer in our pool! And do you say it 'fermometer', or 'thermometer', with a th?"

What the?!

After her Math lesson in reading a THermometer, it ran nicely into a Science lesson on the Winter season and wearing appropriate clothing for keeping your body warm. I brought out her season project from when we learned about Fall and I had her put the seasons in order, starting with Spring. She did!

Then she cut out the appropriate Winter clothing from her Calvert worksheet and glued it onto her Winter page. And that was that for Science!

We had just enough time before lunch for her to catch up on her online lesson from last week that we never got to. A lesson on printers. When she was done with that lesson, I let her use Paint to draw a Winter scene and print it. She even changed the settings to three copies! Something she learned in the lesson. Amazing. I reminded her, though, that she was not to print anything out without me, mom, or dad. That should save Babe's parents about a hundred dollars in paper...a day.

After lunch, I asked her what two sounds the 'a' makes. When she told me, I told her that one of the sounds was called a 'short a' sound. We read some Calvert-assigned books featuring all words with that specific sound. She picked that up really quick, and when both books were read, she told me some more words with the 'short a' sound.

"What kind of sound is the other 'a' sound?"

I didn't want to tell her. I really wanted to wait for another day, but I buckled and told her that it was called a 'long a' sound, but that I didn't want her to think about that yet.

"OK, so I'll learn that when I'm 10?"

Ha! Ten is always her age to go to when I tell her she's too young to learn or do something.

After her quick pick-up with that, she sat in front of the computer for the next 30 minutes and caught up on all her Checkpoints. Woo!

And that was Monday. And now that I look back, it wasn't really a review day! But it was way less stressful because there was no reading comprehension. Tomorrow is really the full review day, so we will see how that goes.