May 7 - 11

I realized this week that we are probably not going to get anything done on Fridays. We tend to have playdates and fun things scheduled for Friday, and since it's the last day of the week, there's no time to catch up on what we miss. The girls spent the night with Grandma on Thursday. I picked them up in time for a playdate Friday morning and we spent three hours with our friends at the park. Then we went to the grocery store and home to rest before going to a cookout that evening. I'm probably going to take Friday off our schedule and let it be a fun day. We had an educational family field trip to Billy's Goat Hill on Saturday, which would count as a day if we were counting. We're not counting yet, but I'll probably start sometime this summer.

Here's what we did the rest of the week:

Math: This week we continued to practice measuring things with a ruler, in inches. We measured a few items off Suzi's desk, and she told which was longest. We'll keep working on this--it's very rough measurement right now, of course. I tested Suzi to see if she had a handle on positional words such as near, far, up, down, below, above, beside, next to, between, over, and under. No point in revisiting that, as I think she's understood them all for quite a while. Wednesday we used our counting bears to introduce the concept of graphs. On the clock, we reviewed full and half hours and introduced :15 times.

Science: Monday we read "Walter the Baker" by Eric Carle and talked about the sense of taste. I told the girls to go play while I made up the snack plates pictured above. I blindfolded them and fed them a taste of each thing so they could guess what each was. Suzi spit several of them right back out. Neither of them liked the spinach, and some of the things were unfamiliar. Above, Suzi and Ivey are continuing the game on their own. Suzi fed an unsuspecting Ivey a mouthful of spinach. Ivey didn't really trust her anymore after that! Wednesday we discussed and watched a few short videos about the life cycle of frogs. The girls both found this interesting. To catch up from last week, we played a sink or float game in the kitchen sink. We rounded up a variety of household items, guessed at whether they would sink or float, and then tested it out. I multitasked by giving Robert a bath in the other side!

Art: Monday, I gave the girls cardboard boxes and scissors. Ivey decided to play Tinkerbell. She cut hers up into "lost things" and handed them out to us.

Health: We reread "I'm Growing!" and I asked the girls to make a body out of play dough. Then I encouraged Suzi to put on a play about what she had learned so far on this subject, but she ended up putting on a play about something else, and Ivey helped. At least they had fun!

Reading: Suzi picked out two new easy readers to work on--"Easter Bunny's Lost Egg" and "Tale of the Christmas Mouse." We spent a few minutes working with her flash cards. She gets excited when she remembers the words. Also, I let Suzi borrow my computer and play on starfall.com for a while.

Writing: We've posted Suzi's name and a couple of words of her choosing up above her desk where she can refer to them as needed. She does write some, but not a lot. I don't want to push writing on her, because it's something I want her to enjoy and feel relaxed about. We are mostly watching and waiting to see her take off.

What I'd like to try next:

1) My parents gave Robert a membership to the children's museum for his birthday. We've only been once and I really want to go back sometime next week!

2) On Friday I talked to two of my homeschooling friends and decided it would be fun to start a homeschooling play group for our area. Hopefully it will take off and help us meet some new families. Suzi needs friends to play with during the day, and I would love some moms to talk homeschooling with!