Outdoor Activity: Rollerblade to the park (bike for L)
Visit Preschool
Literacy: Harry Potter alphabetical order word sorting
Math: Create a graph of all the items on the floor, then pick them up
Science: Test tube crystal ball
Art: Draw Crystal, Document
How it went:
Outdoor Activity: Rollerblading is clearly something we need more practice with. We never made it to the park, and the act of Rollerblading was frustrating for RJ. L also was in a mood, since he didn't want to be outside for some reason (it wasn't hot yet,so it shouldn't have been temperature-related).
Visit Preschool: We are enrolling L in preschool when RJ starts 1st grade, so we wanted to visit RJ's old preschool and get paperwork to fill out and find out what their half-day program looked like now. We visited and RJ got to see his old teachers, which was fun.
Math: I really wanted to clean up the first floor since it's been a while. I've been more focused on doing things with the kids than keeping the house clean, but it was time. I tried to make cleaning up a learning activity and perhaps a motivator. I made a chart with different categories of things that we might find around the house to pick up. I went over the chart with RJ and shared with L that we were going to be recording what we cleaned up. Then as we went around picking things up, we placed a tally mark in the correct category. In doing so, RJ and I discussed how each item is represented by a tally mark, and that every 5th tally mark is drawn across the previous 4, so that we could count by fives in the end when adding up the tallies. At first this concept was difficult for him, as he was initially convinced that the cross line wasn't an actual count like the rest. By the end he seemed to get it, though he was still asking me every time if he was marking his tallies correctly. When we finished picking up everything that was on the floor (the idea was that I could sweep and steam the floors easier without all the toys and random things strewn about), we sat down to count up our tallies. This was good practice counting by fives for him (especially since the numbers got embarrassingly high). He also wrote some of the final numbers down. We made the bar graph of the data after looking at a Harry Potter graphing worksheet. RJ drew the bars for each category.
You might wonder what L was doing during all of this, and I have been struggling with getting him to participate in any of the activities, even those that are at his level (while he is capable of picking things up and was helping out, the tallying and counting by fives was beyond him). Lately he has just wanted to play on his own when we do these, and I've taken advantage of that to do some activities with RJ in preparation for First Grade. When RJ returns to school, there will be a lot more for just L.
Literacy and Science: The cleaning effort took away activity time, so we didn't get to these quite yet.
Art: RJ did document his crystal again today. It's been a while unfortunately, but you can see the differences. We hope to write about the crystals on his blog when the water fully evaporates.
Literacy: Harry Potter alphabetical order word sorting
Math: Create a graph of all the items on the floor, then pick them up
Science: Test tube crystal ball
Art: Draw Crystal, Document
How it went:
Outdoor Activity: Rollerblading is clearly something we need more practice with. We never made it to the park, and the act of Rollerblading was frustrating for RJ. L also was in a mood, since he didn't want to be outside for some reason (it wasn't hot yet,so it shouldn't have been temperature-related).
Visit Preschool: We are enrolling L in preschool when RJ starts 1st grade, so we wanted to visit RJ's old preschool and get paperwork to fill out and find out what their half-day program looked like now. We visited and RJ got to see his old teachers, which was fun.
Math: I really wanted to clean up the first floor since it's been a while. I've been more focused on doing things with the kids than keeping the house clean, but it was time. I tried to make cleaning up a learning activity and perhaps a motivator. I made a chart with different categories of things that we might find around the house to pick up. I went over the chart with RJ and shared with L that we were going to be recording what we cleaned up. Then as we went around picking things up, we placed a tally mark in the correct category. In doing so, RJ and I discussed how each item is represented by a tally mark, and that every 5th tally mark is drawn across the previous 4, so that we could count by fives in the end when adding up the tallies. At first this concept was difficult for him, as he was initially convinced that the cross line wasn't an actual count like the rest. By the end he seemed to get it, though he was still asking me every time if he was marking his tallies correctly. When we finished picking up everything that was on the floor (the idea was that I could sweep and steam the floors easier without all the toys and random things strewn about), we sat down to count up our tallies. This was good practice counting by fives for him (especially since the numbers got embarrassingly high). He also wrote some of the final numbers down. We made the bar graph of the data after looking at a Harry Potter graphing worksheet. RJ drew the bars for each category. 
You might wonder what L was doing during all of this, and I have been struggling with getting him to participate in any of the activities, even those that are at his level (while he is capable of picking things up and was helping out, the tallying and counting by fives was beyond him). Lately he has just wanted to play on his own when we do these, and I've taken advantage of that to do some activities with RJ in preparation for First Grade. When RJ returns to school, there will be a lot more for just L.
Literacy and Science: The cleaning effort took away activity time, so we didn't get to these quite yet.
Art: RJ did document his crystal again today. It's been a while unfortunately, but you can see the differences. We hope to write about the crystals on his blog when the water fully evaporates.
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