Third Month. 1st Week.

Iiiiiiiiiiiiiit's Fall!!!

OK, not technically, but as soon as September comes around I swear you can feel Fall in the air, even here in South Florida.

So since I can FEEL Fall, we decorated accordingly.

Babe had a good time tracing and cutting out leaves and acorns, and Bubs helped a bit with decorating each. Then I hung them from the ceiling. They both loved the effect!

I brought out and checked out all Fall theme books as well, and started reading one or two daily to each of them. By far, the favorite one of both girls was "Fall Mixed Up" by Bob Raczka. Bubs was laughing at every page and Babe made sure to correct each mix up. It is adorable and I highly, highly recommend it for any parent and/or teacher to read throughout the season. You won't be disappointed!!!

I also printed and prepared a Fall-themed puzzle from HomeschoolCreations.com for The Girls to get into the spirit.

It helped a lot. Everyone is excited for end of the year festivities - starting with Fall!

Also, to start a new month, I cleared the classroom calendar and gave Babe a few date clues to see if she could set it up all by herself.

A few minutes later, Babe said she was done and I went in to check...

...and she did it perfectly! I was so impressed! So awesome!

----------

Math:

Babe is moving along so quickly and so smoothly in Math it's pathetic. haha. This past week she was introduced to different ways to subtract, from using a number line to counting up, etc. She picked up both ways very well and even surprised me by how fast and easy she filled in her part-part-total charts using only subtraction clues, since last year in Kindergarten this was a big issue.

But she recognized that the difference in the subtraction sentence is the total, and if she had one part, she had to find the other part. It was just so...neat to see how much she's already learned from last year. I love it.

She is well past the halfway point of First Grade Math. Woohoo!

----------

Reading:

Babe's reading skills have also flourished and she has been reading "Junie B. Jones and the Stupid, Smelly Bus" by Barbara Park all week. She's had a couple of rough spots with comprehension throughout, but it's expected since I know this is her first major chapter book and she's overly excited at the thought of "almost reading Harry Potter" (as she calls it). But since I'm reading it along with her, whenever she does put the book down, I'm able to keep up with details and have her explain to me what is happening. 

She is well above the Phonics part of Calvert's lessons so I am altogether skipping those. But they are very slowly introducing the fact that some words can be changed by adding different endings. Though she is able to read the words fine, knowing how and why they change is a big deal, so I am keeping up with the daily Reading lessons provided.

She's definitely getting a good balance between 1st Grade grammar and Reading at her level. 

----------

Science:

Babe is continuing to learn about plants as living things and what they need to survive. This week was all about how seeds are different from each other, and why the differences help each plant live. An activity was included in this week's plans, and Bubs participated as well!

The point of the activity was to teach Babe the different characteristics of seeds and why they are different. So I each had them pick two seeds - a vegetable seed and a flower seed. Babe picked a sunflower seed and a pea seed, Bubs picked a lupine seed and a bean seed.

They each took turns rolling, blowing, sticking, and dropping their seeds in water. Did you know sunflower seeds float? I don't think I would have guessed that, but out of all four seeds, the sunflower seed is the only one that floated!

No seeds stuck to their socks, and the pea seed was the only one that rolled (not slid) across the table.

 

After the activity, I discussed with Babe the reason for each seed's characteristics. She began to understand that for plants to keep making more of themselves, the seeds had to travel to different areas! And each thing she did with the seeds in the activity were ways that the seed could move! 

A very cool revelation!

----------

Social Studies:

This week Babe learned about map symbols and reading Map Keys. She did well on her test at the end of the week and I am looking to try to create a scavenger hunt in her yard since she is set on reminding me everyday which way North is. haha

I think it would be so fun if I could make an elaborate hunt for her using ordinal directions with something huge at the end of the hunt. 

The wheels in my brain are a-turnin'. 

And that's it for Babe's first week of the third month of First Grade! Kind of amazing everything that's piled into a week but we are trucking along good!

----------

Bubs has been doing so so well in preschool so far and she comes home at lunch eager to work with me one-on-one. I've been preparing little bits of everything to keep her busy while I work with Babe on school in the afternoons, like this color-mixing activity that's based on a Montessori technique.

Since it's the Fall season (yep, saying it again!), I've been reinforcing the color scheme for Bubs to understand. She has been picking out the colors in each book I've read, so I thought color mixing would be a fun activity for her to do.

I set up a baking pan with three clear plastic cups. One cup had red-dyed water in it, the other had yellow-dyed water in it, and the third cup was empty. I asked Bubs to use an eye dropper to mix the colors into the third cup to see what would happen.

 

"ORANGE!!!"

Another cool revelation to see. She was beside herself and filled the orange cup all the way to the top. She asked to do this numerous times throughout the week.

For another color mixing activity, I handed both girls a large sheet of white paper and had them fold it in half. I then handed Bubs yellow paint and Babe red paint and instructed them to only paint one half of their sheet of paper. When they were done, they switched colors and painted their other half. 

 

 

Then I had them fold their sheets in half and squish all the paint together.

 

Then it was time to unfold!

 

Bubs yelled, "ORANGE!" again and I laughed so hard. It was so funny to see her realize what she did.

And what do you know, with two huge sheets of paper all yellow and red and orange, we can hang these up in the classroom as Fall decorations! :)

See you next week!

Three. Two. Five.

I'm going to start off with a video of Babe's book from yesterday.

Today, Math was VERY fun. I started off by quizzing her on the spelling of all 11 numbers she has learned so far. Guess who aced it!?

I gave her five stickers on her sheet and she was enamored. I told her I was so proud of her for learning this and remembering it!

We moved on to the introduction of the number line. I showed her how it worked and ran to her room to grab a toy animal that hopped. I was looking for a rabbit, but a frog was just as good. Especially since I still had those Halloween manipulatives, the flies, handy. It worked out perfectly.

I started off by putting the fly on one of the numbers, with the frog on zero. Then I showed her how the frog hops to the fly, and you count each hop to get to the fly. She did this a few times with ease. Then I made it a bit harder and introduced simple addition to it. I put the frog and the fly on two different numbers and asked her how many hops it took the frog to get to the fly.

I made a worksheet and on one side I made simple addition problems. I told her the first number is where the frog starts, and the second number is how many hops it will take. The number it lands on is the answer to the problem. She loved doing this! She did these problems with ease, too.

Since she did these so well, I quickly thought of another idea.

Algebra. Very, very, very basic algebra.

On the other side of the sheet, I wrote some more math problems. I told Babe that the first number was where the frog would start, and the very last number in the problem is where the fly would be. She had to count how many hops the frog took to get to the fly. She did this with ease too, but loved every minute of it.

She did these, plus her Calvert worksheets, and Math was done for the day. Nearly an hour! What a great feeling.

We then went into Reading Comprehension with a mix of Science, where I changed it up a bit and had her read "Spring is Here" by Taro Gomi. Cute pictures in this book, and it was a neat visual into the order of the seasons throughout the year.

We briefly discussed the appropriate clothes to wear in each, and then we talked about the colors of each season. With this, all the kids participated in a craft, where we pulled out different colors of tissue paper to resemble each season.

Z wasn't too into crafting today, but he managed to get a few colors onto his paper.

Bubs had a great time ripping up some of her colors and gluing them. But once Z was done, she was, too.

Babe surprised the heck out of me. I would have been completely content with a paper collage, but nope. She blew me away with her idea of actually cutting the paper into shapes of each season. She cut out the printed flowers for spring, the printed Christmas trees for winter, and cut out leaves for fall!

Too. Freaking. Cute.

We finished just in time for lunch, and I had a mess to clean up. The seasons of the year threw up all over the table!

After lunch, I handed Babe another book to read for her reading log. She read "Who Loves the Fall?" by Bob Raczka pretty well for all the new and random words that were in it!

(Insert picture I didn't take of reading log + book.)

After she read her second book of the day (!), I loaded Z and Bubs into the bike trailer, Babe got on her two-wheeler, I on my brother's, and we were off on a bike ride around the neighborhood to create a map.

We stopped at every driveway to draw a square for the house and which way the road went. When we went around her block, and as she drew the last line for the road to complete her specific area, I asked her what shape she made.

She gasped. It was so cute.

"Look! A block!!! Like we walk around the block!"

I think that was one of the coolest reactions to a realization she's had yet in her days of Kindergarten so far.

We stopped at each stop sign so she could write the name of the street down on the map.

Towards the end of the ride, I handed her the map and told her to point to where we were. She pointed to the exact point we were, and she said she knew because of how the streets crossed.

"We are standing next to the last street that goes in, so we are here."

Amazing.

This took nearly two hours! But she rode the whole way and didn't complain once. We both had so much fun. As for the other two...

When we got back to the house, we looked at her map and I had her count each house. 66! 66 houses in the neighborhood! I didn't even know that!

Sorry for the camera phone photo, but you can definitely tell where the roads are, and where the houses are. She did an amazing job.

"Next time we go bike riding, let's ride the whole neighborhood. Not just the block!"

So fun.

And that was the end of the day! Literally! It was just starting to become dusk by the time we got back to the house. A very, very, VERY productive day for the little Calvert Kindergartner.