Week 8, day 4

After CBS, Ari and I needed to get our car registered in Texas and get our Texas driver's licences, so we brought the kids along and they learned first-hand about the annoyances of bureaucracy. It wasn't that bad, but I was glad I'd also brought workbooks and paper for the kids to draw on.

Bible: In CBS, the kids heard the story of David and Goliath, and made a craft where Goliath is attached at the feet with a brass fastener to a card background, and he can be rotated to fall over. They told the story with enthusiasm when we returned home. Once we started school, we read the story of Samson.

Calendar: Still cool. By 5:15, when we finally got around to doing this, the temperature was down to 73 degrees. P is getting increasingly good at telling time to the nearest 5 minutes.

Handwriting: I hauled a numbers workbook along to the various car registering places, and P practiced writing the numbers 3 through 10. She disapproved of this workbook's style of "4", but happily wrote it the way HWT teaches. Meanwhile, E wished to write numbers himself. He wrote all the numbers from 1 to 12, and 1, 3, 7, 9, 10, and 11 bore fairly close resemblance to how they were supposed to look. Since he has never (to my knowledge) attempted to write numbers before, I was impressed. P then began writing on a blank piece of paper, and produced, "I luv God. I luv mie frends. Azar and me lik plaing owtside." I didn't give any spelling help except with "Azar". When I asked her which letter to put at the end of "lik" to make the "i" say its name, she promptly wrote an e. She still occasionally reverses "s" and "e", but much less than half the time. Once she was done with her sentences, she wrote the numbers from 1 to 39. She got all the way up to 32 on the one side of the page, and when she flipped it over she started reversing the 3s, but caught her mistake without any input from me and wrote 38 and 39 correctly.

Language Arts: I had P write from dictation the words she had traced yesterday, which she did well. Asked to write a word that rhymed with "hat", she wrote "mat" easily. She also was to finish a story about 2 children preparing lunch. It took a while for her to get into it, but once she did the result was delightful - she turned it into a picnic at a playground.

Math: P had trouble on her 5-a-day with identifying "21" and "13" (I had asked her to put the correct sign between them: greater than, less than, or equal). I helped her figure it out by asking what today's date was (22), what yesterday's was, how that was written, and if it looked the same as what was on her worksheet. She was then able to do it. If I ask her to write 21, she has very little trouble, but reading it is still a struggle for her. She readily completed the coin activity by herself: I asked her to make 11 cents, and then add one coin to turn it into 16 cents. She tried adding a penny, yielding 12 cents, but immediately replaced it with a nickel and correctly deduced that this was 16 cents. 11 pennies and 1 nickel was too much to colour over with a crayon, so I showed her how to put back 5 pennies and replace them with a nickel.

E's "school": E was having so much fun playing with Duplos while P did her seatwork that I replaced the "eggs" in his daily activity with Duplo blocks. His mind wasn't really on the game, but about half the time he achieved success in identifying which of 5 colours I had removed.

Geography and/or science: Perhaps watching us fill out forms and attach our new Texas license plates to our car counts as "social studies"?

Other: No piano practice today. The kids played with Duplos and constructed elaborate houses while I cooked dinner.