Wednesday, August 22, 2007

Readin', Writin' and RAIN!!

Today we started school - 3rd grade and Kindergarten. It is so very, very strange to not have middle and/or high schoolers in the house anymore. So I'm re-adjusting to teaching only young ones and we all had fun! My daughter is using strictly Rod and Staff but we take her Science and Social Studies topics for the week and do field trips, nature walks, experiments, map work, etc. based on that for both children. Today my 5yo was mad at me when he finished "math" (number recognition and opposites) and demanded that I give him tomorrow's math, too. Then he wanted to know why we weren't doing "adding stuff together" (like big sister) so we did some basic addition, too. (Looks like another math lover, Matt!) For the 5yo I'm just using phonics workbooks I have here already, we do "finding letters" games where he finds the "letter of the day" everywhere he can including circling it on old magazine pages, he practices his letter on the wipe-off board and on paper, today he painted it with Watercolors ("W"), and he finds me three different groups of things that he has as many of as the number of the day (today he found 7 toy soldiers, 7 markers and 7 puzzle pieces).

We finally got a little rain last night after 3 weeks of temps over 100 and no rain. Today it's very hot and muggy but you can almost hear the plants breathing a sigh of relief. I'm very thankful that both our veggie garden (which is now done) and our orchard are both within easy reach of a water hose or we would have had no garden and lost all of our hard work and money in the orchard. When we started planting trees, my hubby walked off the orchard and determined its dimensions in large part by how far 2 connected water hoses would reach. Good planning by him!

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