Yesterday's Sick Day

I had been sick the weekend after Thanksgiving. Strangely I felt okay Monday, but Tuesday was really yuck. Even so, I still had school to do. Awesome. : / So far this is the real downside of home schooling. Normally I would have a bit of a break when I am sick, since she would be at school. Nope. Not at HOME-school. : /

I was surprised that they wanted me to teach her even numbers by counting by twos. I had already been doing this as part of my daily system. I have these "dailies" that we do where she has a number of things to practice. In it she has a number of the day and has to determine whether it is even or odd. I explained that "even" meant a number had to be able to be split into two groups where both groups had the same amount. I figured it was a shoe in for division down the road. So every day we would take our number of the day and put them into the place value system. For instance, if the number was "47" she would know to put the 4 into the tens place, and 7 into the ones, then we would then draw 4 sets of 10 and 7 ones. She could then divide the ten frames and try to divide up the ones evenly, or have one left over, and therefore odd. It seemed to make sense, but for arguments sake I also taught her this way too, so now she does it both ways. I just figured the true definition of "even" isn't that you count by twos (it is a characteristic of it) but I thought it was really that the number could be divided evenly. I'm just going to keep on doing it both ways.

I laminated a small 100chart. She loves this. She can use a dry erase marker on it. We play guessing games, where we cover one or more numbers with black dry erase, and she has to guess which numbers are missing. My four year old wanted to try. I thought she wouldn't be able to do it, but I was surprised when she could identify any number missing from the top (1-10) row. She was rather pleased with herself.

This is my old word wall, we had to take them down, so I put them into the sight word rotation that we do every day. Then we started a new one. She wanted to do school words.

And there you have it.

I love Venn Diagrams. We compared "The Snowy Day" to "The Very Snowy Christmas". I pulled the second book on a whim, and amazingly it lined up really well. There's nothing like doing a Venn Diagram where the only thing in common is that they are both books. Kelsey liked "the Very Snowy Christmas" by the way. It is a cute book I got from Scholastic Book Clubs for maybe 3 bucks. I recommend it.

This was part of our science project. She has been learning about habitats. This time we learned about Polar Regions, both Arctic and Antarctic. I wanted to just about die when they listed the Narwhal. Of course this one was her favorite, because it most resembled her favorite beast - a unicorn. I seriously thought it was a mythical creature. Guess not. It looks like I may need to brush up on mythical and real creatures. 

We took some fall leaves that Keira painted at preschool and arranged them into a mobile so she could do one too. The middle has a turkey feather that she did at school. On the turkey feather it says what she is thankful for. She said candy. Oh, that kid!

The weirdest smile I have seen out of her yet.

Of course we did other stuff like word wheels, and cluster sounds. We read, and all the usual. I think she had a good day. She said so anyway. I on the other hand simply wanted to lie with my head next to the toilet.