Three. Three. Four.

I called it yesterday! Today was a really busy day. Really productive, but really busy! And it started off with an addition to the reading log!

She read this one with ease. I'm going to have to go harder on the books when I go to the library! She'll be reading Harry Potter herself soon!

In Math, Babe practiced a bit more with measuring and sorting shortest to tallest. Then came the estimation and, like always, she had a bit of a tough time being wrong, but not nearly as bad as the last time. I reminded her that estimations were guesses, not answers, and she was OK. I asked her to grab a bunch of stuffed animals from her room, and then sort them shortest to tallest. Then I had her estimate how many inches each animal was. Then we measured for real! She actually did really really well with her estimations here!

Math took a while today because she was having fun using the connecting blocks and ruler to measure her animals, so I let her do whatever. After her worksheets were complete, I asked Babe and Bubs (Z was out today) to sit on the couch and handed Babe the remote control for the DVD player. We listened to an audio book for "Julius, the Baby of the World" by Kevin Henkes, but I had Babe do the commands for the player. She couldn't remember the eject button, but I handed her the flash cards we made and she found it right away with the help of those. She did each command - power, eject, play, rewind, stop, and eject, and power again.

After that, we headed to the library, where Babe got to help the teacher out with a story for the little kids. Babe eats that stuff up and the teacher loves her, and the kids pay more attention when a peer is involved, so it's win-win-win. Even Bubs, when I put her in her car seat after class, said, "That was fun!"

After library and lunch, Babe added a second book to her reading log today. Another one she read with ease. Although, the dog's name in the book was Princess, and she kept saying "princesses." I guess all those soft 'c' sounds can be all confusing. But after I corrected her a few times, she was good to go for the rest of the book.

When I put Bubs to bed, I told Babe we were now going to write instructions using the sequence words she learned yesterday, but instead of baking a cake, we were going to write the steps to brushing your teeth. She remembered that the order of words went "first", "next", "then" and "last". While she was illustrating the instructions, I couldn't help but laugh out loud at her cute drawings.

Directions as follows:

1. Put the toothpaste on the toothbrush

2. Brush your teeth

3. Spit (notice how dirty the spit is, filled with "corn and broccoli")

4. Brush teeth again.

5. Spit again (this time, clean spit comes out)

6. Brush your tongue

I put the cards out of order and had her do the actions in silly ways and she was laughing the whole time.

"How can I spit if I haven't brushed my teeth yet!?"

We then rolled into Science, where we learned about what months are in each season. First, I had her put the months in order. When she did that, without one mistake, I had her cut out the season pictures from her worksheet and place them each on their own sheet of paper, in order (Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter). I then showed her the months in Winter, knowing her slight compulsiveness would be upset that the first month of the year was in the middle of Winter. With Winter's months done, she was able to figure out that the first season of the year, Spring, started in March, and so on and so forth with the rest of the seasons. To conclude this activity, we looked through magazines and catalogs for one picture to cut out and glue for each season. This will be an ongoing activity.

To end the day, I brought out one of the brand new books from our Scholastic order that I've been hiding from her. I knew she'd freak when she saw it, and I was excited for her to read it herself, but I was convinced it'd be a little tough for her to read on her own. When I showed it to her, she did exactly what I thought she'd do. Drop her jaw, gasp, and want to read it immediately. I explained to her that it might be a little hard for her, but that if she read it all by herself, I'd let her place the stickers where they needed to be in the book. She was determined to read it, and you know what?

SHE TOTALLY DID.

All by herself. I was so impressed. I thought it'd be tough because there were more words than usual on each page, plus lots of conversation between characters. But while she read, I asked her questions about what was happening and her comprehension was spot on. Towards the end of the book, she even guessed what was going to happen!

It was very impressive and I had goosebumps after every page she read. It was perfection.

And you know what that made today? A three-book day! Three! That's never happened before.

Amazing.

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.