8th. 3rd. 1st.

Today, Babe blew me away in Math. We have moved on to Chapter 3 already, which covers addition, so my plans were to skip through the first four lessons of the chapter since it covered how to build an addition sentence (something she already knows how to do).

To start, I handed her a first worksheet to see how well she could do. She ended up getting them all correct, so then I read aloud some math stories that she was able to figure out quite easily. Then I read her a new kind of addition story but I got out the number line first.

The math story was having Babe figure out one of the two addends that made the sum.

She looked at the number line, and within two seconds, told me the answer.

I was shocked, so I told her another story, and again, within seconds, knew the answer.

“Can I try it without looking?”

“Sure!”

So I took the number line away and told her a similar story.

She answered within seconds! Amazing!

“Babe! This is very hard math and you are making it look easy!”

“That’s because I’m easy!”

haaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaahahhahaha

Sorry. Had to.

So with that, I told her Math was finished. I couldn’t believe how easy it was to her. Figuring out the missing addend was actually something I was stressing about on how to teach her, but she showed me today how ready she is to advance to it. Brilliant.

We jumped into Reading Comprehension, where we were supposed to read “The Enormous Turnip” again from months and months ago. I was going to recycle the activity we did with it, but I wanted to see if Babe remembered the story.

“Do you remember the story called ‘The Enormous Turnip’?”

“Hmm...”

She did think for a few minutes.

“Is that the one where first the farmer tried, then his wife, then the girl, then the dog, then the cat, and then the teeny tiny little mouse?”

I was flabbergasted! Seriously, we read this story back in the first month!

I told her she was exactly right, and because she knew the story so well, I was going to read through it quickly so she could do her worksheet.

And we did. She did her worksheet, and drew this little guy for one of her answers. So cute!

I explained to her that next, she was going to type a story on the computer. I set her up with the laptop and handed her the story she wrote on Friday about what would happen is a cow came to her house. While she did this, I went to the back room with Z and Bubs.

Z was excited to see new bins and went right for the new rice bin where colored beads were hidden for him to find and match with color cards.

Bubs saw the new egg activity and was a little bummed that they weren’t sound eggs, but I made this activity specifically for her.

On each of the six eggs, I wrote a lowercase letter that corresponded with the farm terms she knows so well (cow/cat, farmer, dog, pig, horse, and rooster). Inside each correct egg, I placed the picture of the animal that starts with that letter. I then handed her a pile of capital letters from a foam puzzle and one at a time, had her match the capital letter with which egg it goes into. She liked this a lot, especially since she didn’t know there were animal pictures inside until she opened the first one!

Z saw her opening the eggs and wanted to join in, and once he put his own bin away, Bubs was done and I modified the bin for him.

While Bubs did the new rice bin, I worked with Z and his colors, having him pick the color egg I called out and finding which animal was inside. He loved it! And did it all right!

Magical.

To end their lesson time, I had Bubs match the farm cards she does so well with, then I tried taking the picture cards away to have her read just the word cards. She was able to get horse and farmer, but then grew really frustrated really fast, so I just ended it there. It was a pretty good start though!

I then gathered them together and read them “Big Red Barn” by Margaret Wise Brown, which is so so cute and perfect because they were each able to find the farm animals on each page. Z especially loved it because I checked out the big version of it, the kind of book that’s nearly as big as him!

When the book was finished...free play!

I then walked back to Babe to check on her progress.

She was done.

Done done.

Like, she typed the whole story in 40 minutes (I know it was only five sentences long but holy cow...I wasn’t expecting that).

She had only a few errors - not capitalizing the pronoun 'I' every once in a while, forgetting to capitalize the first letter of the sentence in one or two sentences, but for the most part, she amazed me. Again.

I had her correct her errors and then I printed it. She didn’t like “all the white space on the bottom” but I didn’t want her to cut this precious sheet of paper so I had her illustrate her story again.

She did.

Outside play. Lunch.

After lunch, we measured our Spring Science Experiment, where we found that all three plants are now at equal height - five inches! So the sand had a major boost in growth.

“I can’t wait to see who wins.”

haaa. Cute. Apparently the plants are racing in Babe’s mind.

I then met her on the couch with two farm themed books by Nancy Dickmann. We discussed how all the animals on the farm have jobs to do - whether it be giving food or helping on the farm, and when she was clear that “when cows, pigs, and chickens die, we get to eat their meat”, she was very content with her new knowledge. Thank God, because I had no other way to explain to her how we get pork, beef, and chicken meat. My explanation was plenty for her!

She then added the two books to her reading log.

I would’ve ended the day there, but with how well she did in Math, I wanted to expand a little bit and see what she could do. I grabbed the connecting blocks and a paper cup and showed her the game we were going to play.

“OK, there are five cubes altogether. How many are in the cup?”

“Well, there are two here, so there’s three in the cup, right?”

Right...

So yeah, she picked it up very very quickly, so I made it more and more challenging, only keeping the sum under 10. She is very good at figuring out the missing addend. It’s seriously insane.

“Can I try it with you?”

“Sure!”

I let her have the reigns. I closed my eyes and heard her counting those cubes away.

“OK! I’m done. The answer is 30.”

“OK, well there’s 11 here, so there must be 19 in the cup.”
“How did you know that so fast!?”

ha! Her jaw literally dropped at my swiftness.

“Don’t worry, in a few years you’ll be doing this faster than I can!”

I was very proud of her for all the work she did today and made sure she knew it. I could definitely tell she was just as proud of herself. So cute.

And with that, I let her watch some PBS Kids before getting ready for and heading to dance!

Monday complete!