I Had a Great Post

....all written in my head the other day, about what we were doing and it was going to be witty and heart wrenching at the same time. But I was mowing the lawn while I was composing it and I think the idea leaked out along with the 5 gallons of perspiration I got rid of during the mowing process. But, hey, at least our lawn doesn't look like a jungle anymore! The Kids can go out and play without me having to send out a search party for them later and I no longer have to worry about a boa constrictor lying in wait to gobble up our toy poodle when he goes out to do his business.

Things are pretty ho-hum here at MorningStar lately. I got Papa Piccolo from the library to use as a Five in a Row book, but I've not started it yet. I'm looking forward to it, though, because the book takes place in Venice, so there's a whole lot of options for lessons on Venice and Italy and what it would be like to live in a city with canals instead of streets. I've got a lot of websites bookmarked for us to look at with some great pictures, it's just a matter of getting the lesson started!

Reilly has moved past the doubles lesson in Math-U-See, which was quite fun and actually only took us about three days since she knew most of them already. (Doubles are just the ones that are adding to themselves - 3+3, 4+4, 5+5. etc.) On Tuesday I had her "build" the ones that she didn't know quite as well (4, 5, 6, and 7) and then hid them behind a book. Then I'd call out a problem and when she'd say the answer, I'd lift up the book and say, "WOO HOO!" really loud which gave her a big laugh each time. It really gave her a laugh when I called out 1+1, she answered, I woo-hoo'd and she said, "But Mom, it's not back there!" and I said, "I know, but I like doing that!" *grin*

Now we're onto what MUS calls "Doubles +1" which seems more complicated for me to teach and for her to learn...and I'm not going to try to explain it here because if I'm having trouble explaining it in words to a real live human, my brain might explode trying to type it out! But, the great thing is that I don't really feel any pressure because I know that I can get some great ideas from my friends at JM about how to teach the concept and I also know that we can work on it until Reilly understands it.

Deco is alllll excited and pointing out letters all over the place, which is really fun. We got two more Kumon books for him, one that's tracing and one that's uppercase letters. So he's having fun doing his mazes now and once he gets a bit more control over his pencil I guess we'll work on starting to write letters!