What DID We Do All Day?

We had a busy and fun day today. The morning started with visiting Daddy at work. We only do this a couple times a year and it is pretty exciting.

When we returned home the boys worked on some art.

Afterwards, I brought out new LeapFrog Magnetic Alphabet Set. Kal-El loved our old one so much it didn't work anymore. It still played the alphabet but wouldn't identify the letter or say the sound. Me Too liked it anyway and could often be seen carrying it around listening. I also brought out something totally new, the Word Whammer Fridge Phonics. I picked this up when I bought the new alphabet set because the Word Whammer uses lowercase and the letters are compatible. I packed away the uppercase letters for now (because I don't want Kal-El putting capital letters in the middle of his words) and the boys can use whichever device they wish with the one set of letters. Because Kal-El has already learned print, capitals, lowercase, sounds, and names of the letters Me Too is being exposed to them all as well. I would love to teach him cursive first, lowercase first, and the sounds only but it isn't practical when he literally repeats everything Kal-El says and does like an echo. There is a reason his nickname is Me Too.

Afterwards they played firetrucks together, "built a dam" in Kal-El's bedroom using anything they could get their hands on, and had lunch.

After naps Grammie and Bumpa are picking them up for a two-night sleepover! My husband and I have a couple of dates planned and are getting ready for the invasion arrival of his immediate family beginning this Sunday. My husband's family members are dispersed very far away from where we live. We will have company through the sixth of January! At one point there will be a total of ten people living in this house at the same time. I know this is a normal state of affairs for many of you, but it isn't for us. Figuring out where to sleep everyone in a three bedroom house in the winter when the school room (where I would usually stash Me Too) is 40 degrees is going to be a trick.

I've been cooking ahead for over a month and have all the dinners for the days everyone will be here at once frozen. Yippee!

I don't know how often I will blog while we have company. My in-laws don't actually know I have a blog and it would be difficult to hide such clandestine activities. I have a couple of unfinished posts lingering that may make an appearance if I find some time.

My "Invention"

Sooo...after thinking about it for waaaaay too long this is what I came up with to provide a place for the boys to display the Christmas cards we receive.

It could be a lot better and I make no promises that it will hold up. Basically, as you can see, this is two big pieces of 12X18 drawing paper cut as if you are about to weave a paper placemat. (Everyone did that craft in elementary school, right?). Folded cards can be hung by slipping the back half into any of the slits. The more popular one-piece photo cards are clipped to any of the slits with a mini-clothespin. We happen to be using mini-clothespins in the school room right now so I was looking for a way to expand on that work because they haven't been choosing it.

I finally thought of this idea this morning and it took me two minutes to cut the slits in the paper. I taped it to the window with non-Christmassy blue painters tape. Anyone who put slightly more time into this could make one much nicer. Make it from wrapping paper? Red or Green construction paper? Have the kids put stickers on it? Have the kids fingerpaint them first?

I have to make a couple more because it filled up quickly. I don't know how long it will be before it rips. Making one from fabric or felt might be a better idea and would work just as well if you could keep it up on the window somehow.

Other ideas I had were to have some kind of clothesline on the wall or across the windows. I could have used rope, string or wire. However, I didn't want to put holes in the walls. I thought of tying string or picture wire to suction cup hooks across the windows so you could see out. Unfortunately instead of visions of sugarplums this idea gave me visions of the boys choking each other or hanging themselves.

How do you display your Christmas cards? If you have blogged about it feel free to throw a link up in the MckLinky below.

Behind Kal-El in the picture you can see the box from his new Playmobile Fire Engine. This was a gift from his uncle and he won't put it away. I think he's sleeping with it tucked under his little arm right now. Today he said:

Mommy, I don't want any more presents. This fire engine is the best present I've ever had. I love it and I don't need any more gifts.

Anyway, there is probably some really slick version of this that already exists somewhere. I'm sure I'm not the first person to do this, but I'm too tired to go look.

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Ending Sound Sorts

This post is for Gigi who asked how I have my ending sound sorts set up on the shelf.

I change the containers, style of letters, and objects quite frequently. For example, one of the sound sorts used to be in this bucket and we used our small sandpaper letters:

Sometimes I use wooden magnetic letters. Right now I have several out at once in small Christmas cookie tins from the dollar store like these and printed letters from the Nienhuis-Font version of the printed moveable alphabet:

Off topic...check out the box I'm using for objects to use with the moveable alphabet right now, it's super Christmassy (dollar store again)!

What doesn't change is the general contents of the container: objects, letters, and a train.

I have many little trains like this one cut out and laminated. The engine is in color for beginning sound sorts, the car in the middle for middle sounds, and the caboose for ending sounds.

The first couple of times Kal-El did ending sound sorts I was careful to have all of the initial sounds the same so he couldn't try to sort them by initial sound instead. I have a lot of phonics objects and I was still only had enough variety to do these with a couple initial letters (objects starting with P, S, and D I think) all of my other letters didn't have enough different ending sounds. Now he has learned to check the train to decide how to sort them so it doesn't matter.

I have not done any middle sound sorts with him yet. I am intimidated by the fact that I don't have enough, if any, objects that begin and end with the same letter while differing in the middle. I do have a free activity printed out from Montessori for Everyone that addresses this.

Another variable is how many objects there are per letter and how many letters are in the box. I try to have the same number of objects per letter as a control of error. With initial sound sorts I started with two letters per box and eventually moved up to six. When we started ending sound sorts I knocked that back down to two. For a while we did only ending sound sorts and had built up that number again. I just recently changed the number of boxes available at once on the shelf and decided to temporarily cut down the number of letters back to two.

I usually go into the school room at 7 p.m. for about 15 minutes each night right after I tuck the boys in bed. One of the things I do during that time is change around the object boxes and sound sorts.

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Post Office

There is nothing quite like the line at a U.S. post office within ten days of Christmas. The line this morning was all the way out the door. I would estimate that I started with 25 people ahead of me in line. When we were about halfway through the line, Me Too filled his diaper and I'm sure everyone could smell him. Kal-El announced loudly that he had to pee. Both of them asked everyone if they knew that germs live inside your nose and that they are green.

The post office has no bathrooms.

After posting our packages I decided to walk across the street with the boys to the coffee shop to use their bathrooms. This sounded like a better plan than buckling Me Too into his seat and smashing the source of his mysterious odor into his nether-regions or taking a bet on on whether or not Kal-El could hold it. This would have been much easier if all the transitions from sidewalk to road were not buried in waist-high snowbanks. The city apparently decided it was necessary to clear the sidewalks but not the corners.

The bathroom had no changing table so I had to put Me Too's changing pad on the floor (ewww, gross. Touching the floor in a public restroom). While I was doing this Kal-El made an executive decision to remove his snowboots before getting on the toilet. I changed his socks immediately when we got home.

I felt like I had to buy something since we came in to use the restroom so I purchased a mocha latte. Advice: when walking with two small boys, order the small latte and have them put it in the large cup. As I struggled back across the high-traffic, slush-filled road holding a small mittened hand in each of mine and a cup of coffee latte squirted out all over my jeans and diaper tote with each step.

The barista (can a barista be a "he" or should he be a "baristo"? I've never heard anyone say "baristo" but barista doesn't seem right) asked if I wanted whipped cream on that...no, more like whiskey!

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Decorating

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Talking to Santa

Jolly old Saint Nicholas,

Lean your ear this way!

Don't you tell a single soul

What I'm going to say;

Chrismas Eve is coming soon;

Now, you dear old man,

Whisper what you'll bring to me;

Tell me if you can.

Immediately upon settling on his lap, Me Too said "I love you Santa!" Always practical (and working on the letter "u," Kal El asked for Spiderman underwear and a Spiderman umbrella.

School Day

Today was all about geography. This is what our culture area currently looks like. We needed more shelf space, so I added the cheap wire unit to the right.


You can really see how oversized our sand and water globe is in this picture. Yes, that is an orange to the right of the globe of the continents. The continent boxes will be added one at a time as they are introduced.

What I will need eventually is probably about four shoe shelves stacked in twos and my map cabinet. However, we might be moving in the spring. If we do, I want my husband to build custom shelves for the new school room/library. I know I can put the shoe shelves in closets as organizers throughout the rest of the house, but we already own about ten of them. I also would have felt silly putting the map cabinet in the room when we are only using one map at this time. I had imagined that the map would fit on the shelf the other way but obviously didn't measure.

I drew the continents onto an orange with a blue permanent marker (Sharpie) and gave the classic presentation where you demonstrate how a flat map is made from the round surface of the globe. I did not go so far as to cut the orange into gores.


This turned into a bit of a mess because the orange oil in the peel is apparently capable of breaking down the ink in the Sharpie. My hands turned completely blue and the orange and peel were smeared. (This is why you are supposed to practice your presentations first.) We had to take a brief handwashing break before I could continue the presentation. Everyone might want to remember this orange oil tidbit for when our kids draw on something they shouldn't.


Kal-El also worked on island and lake landforms today while Me Too observed. He pours from some water from a large pitcher into a smaller one to make it easier to control the amount of water he pours into our very shallow landforms. The ability to pour to a line is a prerequisite for this activity. I use a rubber band for the line on the pitcher so that it is adjustable.



Parking was crowded on the island today.


More privacy was available at the lake.



The water was returned to the pitcher many times to the activity could be repeated.


On the occasion that too much water is poured into the landform, it proves a good time to review the story of Noah and the flood.

This looks like a pretty good school day, and I suppose it was. It started out very poorly. My husband happened to call part way through and I told him I wanted to quit.

What happened was that I moved a lot of books around on the library shelves over the weekend to make room for the last bin of labeled children's books. Several "decorative" items purchased for the shelves to fill them in back when we had too much left over space (before 20% of the shelves were filled with Montessori materials and another 20% were filled with children's books) finally had to go. These happened to be a collection of vintage-looking metal cars.

While the boys were eating breakfast I was sneaking around getting those out of the school room because I knew they would be disruptive if they were there while we worked. Unfortunately, sensing I was up to something, Kal-El got down from the table to see what I was doing. He was very interested in playing with them and tried to bring them to school for the day. I had to be rather stern to keep him from bringing them in.

The entire time I was trying to do the presentation with the new globe, map and the orange that I have been excited about for ages his head was drifting away to look longingly out of the school room door toward the cars. I stopped the presentation and told him we would do it another time. This was followed by his wandering around the room aimlessly then poking around in the seasonal boxes that are in there for reorganization. He knows they are off limits. After he ignored my more polite reminders about this for the third time I was much less polite and he stormed out declaring he was "done with school." I let him and tried to take advantage of the time to show Me Too some new sandpaper letters.

Kal-El was outside the room playing with cars. Me Too was inside the room declaring that he was going to show teacher-mommy how to do the sandpaper letters not the other way around. I told him he could do it after he watched Mommy do it. He sat down as if he were going to watch and then started laughing hysterically and tried to steal the other letters waiting in the box. When I told him no, he said he was "done with those letters" and brought out the hammer and pegs.

This is right about when the phone rang and I told my husband I wanted to quit! While I was on the phone, Kal-El rejoined Me Too in the school and they worked on botany and zoology puzzles together. When I returned they continued this work for about 30 more minutes then asked if I would please show them the new maps now. They worked together with the maps for 30 minutes and then with the landforms for another 30 minutes. Kal-El finished with an ending sound sort and Me Too made me a necklace.

All and all they accomplished some good work and it was an excellent reminder of how the system works if you let it.



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