Five. Two. Four.

Today, Babe proved her consistency in Math. I gave her a little "test", for lack of a better word, and told her number stories one at a time. With each number story, I had her write the number sentence that went along with it. I gave her seven of my own number stories (both addition and subtraction), and two she made up by herself, and she wrote every sentence correctly! It was amazing. It's so cool watching her progress so fast. I declared today the end of learning about basic subtraction! She did her chapter review worksheet and we moved on to Reading Comprehension!

For Reading Comp., she read the article at the end of "Ten Little Puppies." The article was about Scott Nash, the illustrator of the book. The article showed what Nash does to illustrate a story - first he sketches, then he paints. When Babe was done reading it, she wanted to illustrate a book immediately, but I told her we were going to wait until after lunch to illustrate something special. But next we had to do discuss our next community helper...train conductors!

Babe knew what a train conductor was "because of Dinosaur Train" and I didn't have to go into too much with what they do, because when I asked her to tell me, she pretty much listed everything.

"How do you know so much about train conductor?"

"Because I love love love the movie Polar Express!"

That's true. They do love that movie. And the movie does a good job showing what the conductor does on a train. So yep. Our discussion was short and sweet. Time for the craft!

The craft today was shape trains. Babe's mom prepared a bunch of shape cut outs for me ahead of time, and she made her own train to use as a guide! I first gave each kid their own pile of shapes and asked them to put the "puzzle" together and try to make it a train. Babe knew right away what to do and Bubs knew to put the circle at the bottom of the paper, but with everything else she kind of randomly placed them on the paper. I specifically had Bubs and Z sit on the opposite side of the table as Babe, and when Bubs asked me for help, I put her mom's completed shape train in front of the two youngest to use as a guide.

When they were done gluing their trains together, I then asked them to draw where they wanted the train to take them. Babe chose "You Nork City" (OMG how cute is that?) mainly because we were talking about subways during our discussion, and Bubs chose the sun.

When everyone was done with their train and destination, we miraculously had time to go to Bubs and Z's library class! So that's where we headed! We got back in time for lunch, then it was time for a first.

I had Babe write a poem. We reviewed "Ten Little Puppies" and had her point out which words rhymed on each page. She then realized that the number words were rhyming with something, so I told her her poem was going to be five sentences long, using the number words one, two, three, four, and five.

So I first had her pick a topic to write about.

"Pancakes and sandwiches."

OK then. Food. I guess I shouldn't have expected anything else, as we are Italian.

I then had her figure out a word that rhymes with "one."

"Done!"

Good. OK, so we had the rhyming process down pat, so I asked her to now think of a sentence with the words "one", "done", and "pancake".

"One pancake then I'm done."

Perfect! We followed this process for the rest of the five sentences and they got sillier and sillier.

When she was all done with her poem, I had her name it and write it at the top. Then came the illustrating. She sketched a picture first, just like Scott Nash, then I brought out the watercolors so she could paint it to finish it up.

Babe's first poem is as follows:

"Silly Foodies"

One pancake then I'm done.

Two sandwiches then I'm through.

Three onions help my knee.

Four watermelon then I want more.

Five sodas then I go go go to dive.

I adore it! And her illustration has all the foods in her poem sitting on a table. A table that's outside. I can't get over how well she's doing in school in general. We are having way too much fun.

Her Writing lesson took a little longer than an hour, and it was time to wake up Z and Bubs. I set up some chairs in the living room and lined them up like a train, then put on the movie "Thomas and the Magic Railroad" to end the day. They even got a special train-shaped snack thankyouverymuch.

On to Friday! Woo!