741.

Spring Break was beyond amazing. Babe wrote about it.

I'm not going to post pictures on the blog, but it was awesome. Trust me. And ALL the kids had a blast. It was great to get out of the house all week and not worry about school at all.

Today was Babe's first day of First Grade Math. She was so proud of it and she found ways to challenge herself, in addition to me challenging her. For example, when I asked her to count something, she counted by twos. And actually skipped over the correct ones to count correctly by twos. Amazing. She know she's good.

I first gave her the pile of attribute shapes, new in Grade 1, and asked her to sort them.

"How?"

"Any way you want."

She sorted them by shapes first.

Then I asked her if there was any other way to sort the shapes. And before I could finish my sentence, she was already sorting them by color.

Then I went ahead and introduced her to a new idea she will learn more about later this week - adding a third attribute to the sorting, or using a Venn diagram. I asked her to put all the blue shapes in one pile, and all the squares in another. She did!

She had the blue squares already in the blue pile, but when I asked her why she put them there, she was confident she was right.

"They are blue!"

"But they are also squares."

"Oh..."

So she went to take them out of the blue pile and put them in the square pile. When she did, I asked her why she moved them.

"They are squares!"

"But they are also blue!"

She was a little frantic, haha. But then I told her that they go in the middle of the two piles, because they fit in both piles.

I had her do this one more time with red triangles. She started to understand. And I didn't introduce the actual visual of a Venn diagram yet. I just wanted her to know the concept of a third attribute, which she does.

We continued with Math, working on position words, which she knows very well. I enhanced her work a bit and took the first worksheet and had her gather all the information she could about the illustration.

We set this aside for later.

Babe did the rest of the worksheets, and her first First Grade Math lesson was in the bag.

High five!

We scooted through her Reading Comp. lesson and once she answered the questions to my liking, I set her up with individual work before heading to the back with Bubs and Z. While I was in the back, I wanted Babe to use the information she gathered about the balloons and create a graph. I helped her assemble some of it, then let her do her thing. When she finished, she had her word search to work on.

Since St. Patrick's Day and Spring Break is over, I brought back the transportation themed bins for Bubs and Z. Z started his day with the shadow matching sheet, and Bubs started her day with, what else, the pre-writing tracing sheet.

When they were both done, I gathered them together to work on the names of each vehicle. Z wanted to match all the flashcards with the toys from around the room, so once Bubs joined in, it became a huge game.

Once the cards were set out, I had Z match the image to each flashcard, then I gave Bubs all the words, and had her match the words to each flashcard.

THEY BOTH DID THIS FLAWLESSLY! I was so proud of Bubs. She carefully looked at each letter and made sure they matched before moving to the next word. So cool.

When she finished that, I had a new sheet made up with a select few vehicles. It had the picture of the vehicle, then the word, but missing the first letter. I had Bubs match the picture cards, then match the word cards, which she did. Then I had her find which letter magnet belonged as the first letter. I was a little iffy about this because we were working with lowercase letters, which she doesn't quite know yet, but she actually did this exercise pretty well! She was able to look at the first letter on the word card and go over to find the letter magnet that matched!

Very impressive. Double high fives!

To end the lesson, I went a little further with the challenge and had her match the lowercase letter with the uppercase letter. She did this fairly easily too!

Really cool. We are moving along great!

High fives. Play time!

I went back out to see how Babe was doing and she was finished with her graph. A perfect graph, might I add!

We then briefly discussed water transportation, and how it was different than land transportation. After thinking of a few different ways to transport in water, she added "Boats, Boats, Boats" by Joanna Ruane to her Reading Log (a pretty easy book, but a book nonetheless). After discussion, we headed outside for free play.

After lunch, we checked in on our Spring Experiment that we started last week. I had Babe plant two bean seeds in four different types of land, or Earth. We have a cup of sand, peat moss, soil, and rocks. I had Babe predict which kind of land would be the best for growing our beans. She predicted that the soil would produce the best bean plant.

During our check up, though there was no height on any of our seedlings yet, the seeds in three of our cups have opened. I suspect that one will have height tomorrow to record. I'll leave that up to you to guess which one has height already.

After the check up, I had Babe grab one more library book with a water transportation theme. She read "The Yellow Boat" by Margaret Hillert for her Log.

With it, I had her write down one word from each page of the book. When she did, I asked her to circle all the vowels in each word, reminding her what the vowels were and that every word has a vowel. She finished, then looked at me.

"You told me every word has a vowel!"

"Every word does have a vowel!"

"I found one that doesn't have any!"

I frantically searched my brain for every word that I could think of. I looked at her and asked which one.

"My!"

I laughed to myself and sighed a huge sigh of relief. Then I told her that sometimes, the letter 'y' is a vowel. In words like 'my' when there aren't any vowels, the 'y' becomes a vowel.

She had a good laugh about that, though.

Today was an incredible day at school. I told Babe to keep it up!

Double high fives and double stickers!

Onward to Tuesday!