Wednesday, December 29, 2010

Art Lessons




One of Annaliese's favorite activities is getting real art lessons from her Uncle Chris. She is so serious about her artwork. It's amazing what she learns when she has a paintbrush in her hand. The lessons go far beyond basic art....the conversations and questions that come up while she's painting are so thoughtful and deep.

Friday, December 24, 2010

Nature/Science School





Annie loves, loves, loves going here each week. She attends this class once a week for 2 hours. It's perfect for her. They learn so much about so many different animals, habitats, weather, insects, dinosaurs, etc. These pictures are from her holiday celebration. You can see how eager Maggie is to join in!

Friday, December 17, 2010

The letter "K"...

We are rolling along in handwriting...except for the letter K. I'm not sure what it is about this particular letter, but Annie is having the hardest time with it. We are building it with wood pieces, using the mini chalkboard, tracing, etc., and I know it will just click one day, just not today. I just feel bad for her...she is so good at forming letters, and this bothers her that she is having trouble with this one. We finally left it alone and jumped into reading and math! :) You can see what I'm talking about in these photos. Poor thing. ;)



She read a whole book to me today, which made me so happy! I asked her to just read me one page, then another page, and sure enough she read the whole book! We just need to work on some sight words and then she'll be on a roll.

In math, she is still reviewing even and odd numbers, patterns, and she is learning about rows and columns.


In this photo, she laid out all of her dot cards, in no particular order, and then put a red tile underneath the even numbers and a green tile underneath the odd numbers. Then, she put all the dot cards into order from least to greatest (she's learning those terms) and again, placed the tiles under even and odd cards. From that, she was able to see the pattern of even, odd, even, odd, etc.

Saturday, December 11, 2010

Back to the Books!

We have been on the go for a couple of weeks, and now we are back in a routine 'of sorts' for a little while! This week we've been having fun with letters and reading, especially. I am so proud of Annaliese. She is able to sound out and spell so many words.

In this activity I would ask her questions about a letter and then she got to color the letter. For example, I would ask her, "Which letter sound do you hear at the end of the word LION?" She would tell me, "N". She is really good at recognizing letter sounds. But, she did ask me, "Why does CAT start with a C and KITTEN starts with a K?". Oh my goodness, if I only knew that answer!! You never realize how silly the english language is until you are teaching someone to read. So many of the rules do not make sense and do not carry through for many words. How about the pronunciation of the words, HEIGHT and WEIGHT, or the spelling and pronunciation of the word COLONEL? I could go on and on. ;)