Catching up!

Well, I realize we've been slacking on updating this blog, and now that all the craziness from the holidays has calmed down, and life has settled back into a predictable rhythm, I figured we would post a few of the things we have been up to this week.

First, I've been feeling that although they are really good at them, the kids are starting to get a little sick of some of their worksheets. So I've been doing a lot of research on different activities and games that can help reinforce some of the concepts they are learning and maybe even show how they are real life skills as opposed to work that they are doing because they have to for school. One simple example is that they always groan about the half page of addition or subtraction problems that is included with almost every math lesson in their workbooks. They just seem to get board with it much faster than the other exercises.

Thus, I figured out a game, which involves the dice we use for our twice a week after dinner Farkle tournaments. We simply take one die and take turns rolling, adding up the numbers that we individually roll, until one of us reaches 100. Very simple,but the kids really enjoyed it, and I can also adapt it to subtraction, and I'm sure many other concepts.

Here is our individual scoresheets from our game this morning.

Also, They really enjoy telling us the time, and to encourage the use of analogue clocks instead of digital, which seems to be very easy for them, we made dry erase wrist watches, that they can use to answer questions about time, and also figure out questions about the passage of time (ex: if your bedtime is 8:00, and you get up at 7:30, how many hours pass while you are sleeeping?

here they are feeling all cute with their watches.

We also have a Valentine's party on Friday with our homeschool group where we are supposed to create "mailboxes" with a theme of "Fall in love with books", where they pick a favorite book and represent it with their boxes. Emily picked Emily Goes Wild , a cute story about a monkey (Em's current favorite animal).

Ian originally picked a Dr. Suess book, which would have been easier, but settled on one of his favorite Star Wars books that he is working on reading. Unfortunately, there are no illustrations, so we were forced to get creative with decorating, but I think it turned out well, and we incorporated the book directly into the box. They also made some cute foam crafts to hand out as valentines at the party. Check out the pics below...