Friday!

Our Friday started early! The kids love watching the Sunny Side Up show on PBS Kids Sprout in the mornings. This weeks theme was music. You can send in messages to the live show on their website, so we sent in this picture of Reagan

with a note to Chicka: "Dear Chicka, I love playing piano with my Oma." And they showed it on TV! Reagan thought it was so cool to see her picture on TV!

We need to get going with our day and do some more fun, and educational activities, but I will update later with what else we have done today. :-)

Thursday

The weather this week didn't really lend itself to a hike, so we did some indoor activities instead. We read another chapter of The Secret Garden, and are not about to start Part 4, the last section of the book! Reagan completed more of her Blues Clues letter book, and is now about 2/3 done with it. She would have love to have completed it yesterday, but Adam was getting up from his nap, so we had to break. But she read her Poingo books a lot, and she helped bake some yummy banana bread. She's also been doing a great job of teaching Adam what things to do to help out.. like setting the table. :-)

Terrible Tuesday, Wednesday.. Worse

Well.. we didn't do so well as far as getting stuff done yesterday as far as education. Reagan read her Poingo books. We got a new one and she was thrilled though! I think that was about all we got done yesterday and I feel kind of bad about that. :-( We even missed reading our book chapter. Ugh.

Today she has been reading her Poingo books more; always good. But other than that, nothing yet. Once Adam goes for a nap, we'll sit down and catch up on The Secret Garden, and then do some other activity I manage to come up with. :-) We also need to bring our seeds inside. We have a science project that is ongoing; our garden. We planted seeds for this year, and placed them outside in a mini greenhouse. But our weather has been so terrible, suddenly cold and very windy again, that nothing has even germinated yet. We're hoping to bring them inside and get them started in here at least. The problem is that we planted them in Pete pots, so we'll need to have some sort of trays under them inside. Plus find a place to put them when the kids won't get into them.

The worst thing thus far today though would be my call to the Montessori school where we'd like to eventually send the kids. They were really nice, and answered all of my questions, but..... And you knew there's be a but. It turns out that although they use to test children in for kindergarten, due to changes in state law.. they can no longer test in kids with b-days after a September cut-off date. No, they can ONLY take children who are ALREADY 5 by an AUGUST cut off date. Which means Reagan has to wait a full 2 more years to start school. By that time I'm worried she's going to be SO bored in school. Ugh. Well Adam's down for a nap, so it's off to do some activities.. I'll try to report back on those later.


UPDATE:
We read 3 chapters of The Secret Garden.
Reagan has read Poingo books at least four times
We completed 6 pages of a Blues Clues letter workbook
Completed A and B in a 1st grade letter workbook
Practiced writing the letter A- she also rote M, W, and O on the page
Made homemade air popped popcorn for snack
Drew some pictures

Monday 4/13

Today so far, Reagan read all of her Poingo books at least twice, we have read 2 chapters of The Secret Garden, and played the Zoboomafoo board game. The game is a lot of fun, and teaches animal names, and what kinds of foods the animals eat. It's not even 1 yet though, so I'm sure we will do more later today. :-)

And the update: more Poingo reading, and Leap Frog reading!

This week in Education

We have started doing weekly hikes. Hiking gets us out of the house, and not only gives us exercise, but also gives us time to talk about things. Just this last week Reagan started asking a whole bunch of questions while we were hiking around Lynx Lake; "Do fish poop? Do they poop in the water? They do? Are fish dirty in the poopy water that's dirty?" You could tell she didn't really approve of this. But she continued. "Do ducks drink milk from their mommies? They're birds. Oh right that's mammals, like piggies, and kitties, and doggies. They're the ones who spend a lot of time in their mommy's tummy."

Today we also started our new reading program. We just got a set of the illustrated classics at the thrift store. Reagan got to pick one, and we are reading a chapter a day. Her first choice was the Secret Garden. Can't wait to find out what happens when Mary arrives at her uncle's manor tomorrow! After reading chapter 1, we read a reader book about snakes, and worked on learning snake as a sight word. Reagan definitely knows some sight words already, including the word stop. :-)

We're also trying to be diligent about our weather record keeping this month! We haven't missed a day yet. And speaking of charts, Reagan has been working very hard on keeping up with her chore chart!