The tale of the biker man has evolved into a series of stories (The Biker Man Chronicles, perhaps?). We’ve been on a silly-story-telling spree lately, and I had fun working with these particular ones to make them into fun tongue-twister stories.
So here’s the prequel to the story of the Biker man from my last post. Read more…
Besides answering All the Questions, another fun activity we like to do on long car rides is make up silly stories. N and I got rolling (umm, no pun intended) on a pretty silly story the other day and he helped me recall it tonight so we could be authors and write our very own book. Read more…
… At first we practiced filling up the spaces with shells and counting them until N got familiar enough with the visual that he could tell me at a glance how many shells there were (for numbers 1 – 10). Then I filled up the first one with 10 shells and put a few shells in the next 10-frame so he could see that for numbers greater than 10, you don’t have to start counting from 1 every time — you know there’s already 10, so you can just add on. Here’s our visual of the number 14, which is clearly, from the diagram, 10 + 4.
Then I extended the idea to include adding two numbers that were each less than 10. For example, I set 5 shells in the top 10-frame and 7 in the bottom one. Then he would take shells out of the bottom one to fill up missing spaces in the top one. So 5 + 7 became 10 + 2, since the 7 shells were used to fill up the 5 empty spaces and there were 2 left over. Then we went back to the previous idea of counting on from a full 10-frame to find out that there were 12 altogether. … Read more…
The other day, as we were driving, N noticed a sign on a store that had a picture of 3 raindrops. He asked us about it, but it took a lot of explaining on his part to get us to understand what he was talking about, since us grown-ups have lost the superpower of Looking Up and Noticing New Things.
When I finally found the sign he was looking at, I explained that it was that company’s logo. Of course this, as with everything, only led to more questions. We ended up having a great mini-marketing crash course that might be roughly summarized with the following points. (You’ll have to imagine “whys?” inserted after every. single. statement to get the full impact of the moment.) Read more…
… Little brother climbed up on the table at this point and started putting pieces on the board (he loved the magnetic part!). He kept shouting, “I found a united state!” as he slapped a new piece down somewhere on the map. 🙂
We also have an inflatable globe ball that we sometimes play with, but it’s been deflated for the winter since it was being used more as a Destroyer Of The House than an educational tool. Perhaps I can test their upgraded maturity levels this summer and try to re-introduce it. 0_o … Read more…
… I picked up this book about a year ago for a couple dollars. I think a good target age group would be 3-5 year olds. It’s set up for independent learning stations in schools, but works great for homeschooling.
I followed their instructions to make folders out of the individual units and we’ve pulled them out occasionally to work on a random topic. They’re all realllly basic, but lead to great conversations. … Read more…
… As I watched them play, I thought this might be a good opportunity to practice some grouping skills with the boys and work in an introduction to graphs. I grabbed some dry-erase markers and drew up simple horizontal and vertical axes on the window, with numbers going up the side and categories of objects going across. (trains, cars, planes, people) N caught on pretty quickly and had fun searching out like objects from the sticker pages, deciding which category they fit into, and stacking them so they lined up with the numbers on the vertical axis. It turned out to be a pretty successful (based on his level of interest) “math lesson” for the day ~ this always makes the ex-math-teacher mama bear happy :). … Read more…
… I suggested he put random letters on the bag or try to write words with the stickers. He wanted to write “N’s amazing rock collection” but settled for “rocks.” This simple activity spurred some great learning moments:
He sounded out the word and decided he needed the letters R O C. I asked what other letter made a “cah” sound and he remembered that K did. We talked about how English is a silly language because people a long time ago made it up by combining a lot of different rules and then they changed most of those rules, so here we are today using two letters that make the same sound to spell a simple word like Rock. He was okay with that.Â
He knew he needed to add an S but couldn’t explain why, so I reminded him that adding an S makes things plural. I’d never taught him this before, but he learned it somewhere. … Read more…
… When they (I don’t know who) designed it, they accounted for the salmon that needed to travel upstream back to their home to spawn so they built a fish ladder with glass viewing windows for visitors to see the 5 feet (?) fish swimming in large groups upstream against a massive current. It’s amazing to see this, and it’s neat for the boys to get a close up look at life-cycles and the ways that people have worked to maintain species in their natural habitat in spite of industrialization. We’ll try to go back during peak season and get more pictures. There was a great little history museum there describing the process of digging the canals and building the locks, but it was way above the boys’ interest/understanding levels at this point. … Read more…
I had made no plans for the day, but it turned out the day had adventures of its own for us. One of my friends came over in the morning and she played wonderfully with the boys! They loved the attention and she helped them get a lot of wiggles out. The boys danced to their […] Read more…
