8th. 2nd. 3rd.

Crazy busy day today, but Bubs had a huge advance in knowledge that blew my mind so I was running on adrenaline for a lot of the day.

Babe's Math lesson again lasted the whole morning. She worked a lot with word problems and has them pretty much understood. She hardly needs the number line anymore and impressed me with how quickly she was able to answer some of them. After a bit of practice, we moved on to ordinal numbers through tenth and quickly reviewed them. When we were finished with the lesson, I set her up with some worksheets and headed to the back room.

Z was a little out of sorts today so he didn't participate in lessons.

I modified the egg shaker activity so that instead of matching colors, the point was to match sounds only. Once Bubs realized that the previous answers were now all wrong, she absolutely loved this activity and couldn't get enough of it. When she asked to do it for a fourth time, I had to tell her to pick a different bin so I could set up her last activity.

While she did her apple-picking bin, I took all the farm term cards (again, from 3dinosaurs.com) out and laid out the wordless 'dog' and 'cow' picture cards. I chose these two because I know she knows how to spell dog, and every time she sees the worded cow card, she names each letter. So when I laid these out, she put the apple bin away and came over.

I first handed her the word card 'cow'. I asked her to put this under the right animal.

She pointed to each letter herself.

"C-O-W. Cow."

AMAZING! She did the next one, dog.

Adorable.

I then put the 'cat' picture card out, along with the rest of the word cards. I then asked her to say the word cow, and tell me the first letter of cow.

"C!"

"Right! Now say 'cat.'

"Cat!"

"What is the first letter in c-c-cat? Remember, it sounds the same as c-c-cow."

"C?"

"YES!"

I then had her find the word 'cat', which she recognized as the only remaining word with 'c' as the first letter. I distinctly remember teaching Babe to read like this, only she was about a year younger than Bubs is now. But still, this is a huge step in the reading process and I'm so so excited!

I then put out the picture cards for 'horse' and 'farmer', knowing that these were the only two words I had huge clues for (since she knows what the F looks and sounds like, and H is the first letter in her first name).

"Do you remember the first letter in f-f-firefighter?"

"F!"

"Yes! Now listen. What is the first letter in f-f-farmer?"

"It's the same! F!"

Brilliant. So I had her find the word 'farmer.' Which she did. Easily!

"Good job! Now, what is this a picture of?"

"A horse."

"Right. What is the first letter of h-h-horse?"

"Hey, that's my name!"

"You're right, it sounds like your name! What is the first letter in your name and in horse?"

"H!"

Gah! I had goosebumps the entire time. When she found the word 'horse' she knew her brain grew a hundredfold.

For the remaining farm terms, I had her match the word cards with the picture+word cards.

Then, to make sure that what just happened wasn't a fluke, I left the top row of pictures there and took away the words. Then I handed her the words one at a time for her to use her clues to match them with the correct pictures.

SHE DID!!!

I was so proud of her I gave her a sticker right away!

Then it was time for craft time (which replaced free-play today).

Part of Babe's Science lesson was learning about what kind of animals live under water. After naming a few, I handed each kid a white sheet of paper and had them go find white crayons.

"OK, now I want you to draw what kinds of things live under water, but I want you to draw them only with white crayons."

"Uhh Tat2, we can't see white crayons on white paper. You told me that when I was like, 3."

Ha! She's right. But I told them to try as hard as they could because what we do next will be really cool. I handed them each a cookie cutter shaped like marine life that they could trace.

Bubs thought it was pretty funny that she couldn't see her drawing yet I was taking a picture of it. They didn't understand what they were doing but I told them to try to draw as hard as they could with their white crayon. And if they did that, the next step of the craft would be really cool.

When they told me that they were done drawing, I set them up with watercolors and told them to now cover every part of their paper with color. Babe started painting a picture since she didn't quite understand what was about to happen, but I told her to just scribble all over her paper with the paint.

Their pictures didn't quite turn out how I expected, but I did this craft along with them and when Babe saw mine, she was amazed.

"Next time we do this I will definitely have to push harder on the crayon! Can we try again tomorrow?"

Free play. Lunch. Outside play.

After lunch, we discussed a bit more about continents, countries, and states. We brought the maps out and I quizzed her a bit and asked her which continents certain countries and states were, which she answered all correctly. Then I sat her at the table for another visual aid activity.

I printed out an outline of Florida, the USA, and of North America. I had her pick a color to color the state of Florida, then had her find and color the Florida on the outline of the country, then the same on the outline of the continent.

Then I had her do the same thing for the USA and North America.

Then I had her order them from smallest land mass to largest, and glue and label them on a sheet of construction paper.

I think this activity pretty much set her mind in knowing and fully understanding the properties of states, countries, and continents (except I think her brain exploded when I told her that Australia was a country and a continent. Oops. hehe).

We spent the rest of the afternoon discussing where in the world our favorite foods come from. We looked in the fridge for the stickers remaining on the fruits and vegetables and I had her point to the correct country on the map. Then I had her tell me which continent that country was in. She actually really loved doing that.

"From now on I'm going to look at all the stickers on our food and show you where they come from."

ha! Cute. That actually gives me an idea for an ongoing project...

Though the grapes in her fridge were from Chile, I told her about how California grew a ton of grapes and how they have places called vineyards where grapes grow and are turned into wine. We then called up Babe's grandma (my mom) so Babe could hear a first-hand experience about a trip my mom took to the vineyards!

"A long time ago, people used to put the grapes in big buckets and then, they used to get in the buckets with their bare feet and step on the grapes to squeeze the juice out!"

"EW GRAMMA! Weren't the buckets really dirty though?!"

ha! Bare feet and she's worried about the bucket being dirty.

You know what I had to do next.

Yes, I grabbed the iPad, got on YouTube, and showed Babe the episode of I Love Lucy where she was at the vineyard squishing grapes.

Babe. Laughed. So. Hard.

She nearly fell off the couch. It was so funny. I also had tears in my eyes from laughing so hard.

We officially ended the day by adding another book to her reading log, "Easter Parade" by Mary Chalmers. I think this was the last Easter-themed book before we return them all to the library tomorrow. Crazy! Time is flying!

It's already Thursday tomorrow!