This week has me thankful for the little things. I am happy that we are all healthy. I am happy to have had several uninterrupted hours of school time. I am happy that it has been relatively boring around here for the past few days!
We took a camping trip up to Fort DeSoto for the weekend and it was a lot of fun and also pretty relaxing. It was the perfect way to get us back in our groove here at home.
This week we have had time to focus on the "fun" stuff, the stuff the girls really enjoy. For instance, Lily loves to be in charge of snack. On Monday, she chose Ants On A Log (with carrots instead of celery) and helped her sisters make it.
They have also been able to spend more time outside. The weather has cooled down a little bit so they have been spending a lot of time playing outside and adding some more fun things to their discovery journals. Lizards were a hot topic this week.
Back in the school room, the routine is back in place and it feels so good. Ruthie has a set of shapes in her busy box this week with no instructions. She took them out and first sorted them by color. When I looked back over after a few minutes, I noticed that she had re-sorted them by shape.
Also during busy box time, Josie taught Everett how to stick the straws in the can. He does not put them in the right color, which irritates her, but he does try to get them in the can which is way better than in his mouth!
We are still reading Farmer Boy. I think this is the one thing that got completely ignored over the past few crazy weeks! Anyhow, Lily enjoys using her Literature Response Journal after we read. She draws a picture of a scene that we read about that day and adds a short caption. I always love seeing what she chooses to include.
Ruthie is working hard and making great strides with her handwriting. She has done great with letter recognition and sounds and I think we may be starting some phonics work soon. I am really amazed at this because she technically wouldn't even be in VPK this year if they were in public school due to her October birthday.
Josie loves to spend time working one-on-one with me but seems to love working with Lily even more! Today, Lily used the shape blocks and had Josie sorting by color and shape similar to the way that Ruthie was using them. Lily is so patient with her and it makes me so happy that they get to work together like this!
While Ruthie does enjoy working as a group and working with me, she is really most comfortable working alone. When she has worked through the activities in her busy box, she goes through the storage bin to find more things to work on. This afternoon, she decided on patterning. She worked through AB, ABB and was on ABC when we wrapped up our day.
Since the girls really love to cook, we decided to bake a cake this afternoon. We went with pineapple upside-down cake and it was yummy. A can of sliced pineapple only has 10 rings, though!
