Thursday, August 29, 2013

Triangles, Circles, and Roller Coasters

Ingram School is wearing us out!!  Rachel and I are exhausted at the end of the day.  Ruby gets a nap every day, thank goodness!, so she makes it through all right.  Ford is hit or miss...somehow that boy never lacks energy.  He has been saying lately that he is nocturnal and I'm beginning to see a sleeping pattern similar to that of Uncle Hobo only Ford wakes up as soon as he sees a 6 on the clock and is ready to roll!!
Rachel has been doing an awesome job with her school work.  Today she even wrote her first story complete with an illustration.  It was about fairies and it was three sentences long, but oh my goodness it was so cute!!  She and Ford are both zooming through handwriting and math.  Ford learned the fine art of Dot-to-dots with the alphabet today.  I love that he's found something he can sit and do by himself other than playing trains All.Day.Long.  Ruby had her own little sticker station for about 30-45 minutes today.  That girl LOVES stickers!!!  She went through the sticker book and took out all of the stickers that had any kind of pink on them and put them on a pieces of paper.  That's all she wanted to do.  It was awesome (and allowed me to help Rachel with her story!).  Rachel and I have been talking about the four seasons and today we put the summer and winter solstices and vernal and autumnal equinoxes on her calendar.  That girl LIVES for her calendar.  She said today, "I really should just keep my calendar in my school tray."  I couldn't agree more.  Yesterday we had an awesome time making triangles together.  We cut triangles, we pasted triangles, we made triangles with popsicle sticks, we used those to stencil triangles onto paper and cut more and pasted more.  We even had triangle pineapple tidbits, triangle peanut butter tortillas, and pretzels with triangle shapes in them for lunch.  It was all out of the blue but worked out perfectly.  So, today, I tried to do fun things like that with circles.  Let's just say it wasn't as fun.  Rachel thought it was boring, Ford wanted to cut but I tried to explain that circles are a lot harder than straight lines, and Ruby just kept getting frustrated that there was too much paper on her crayons.  It was a mess.  I finally got Rachel interested in gluing circle strings out of yarn onto our poster board, but she wanted to do about 100 of them and I needed to move on to the crying 2 year old in the corner so Rachel got mad and stormed off.  For snack, they were all throwing a fit as I sliced their strawberries to look as close to circles as possible but they were quickly sedated when I brought out two doughnuts and demonstrated circles and semicircles.  We also had a little incident during Social Studies time as Rachel and I were having an AWESOME time looking at a map of our town and telling if places were east, west, north, or south of our house and then looking at a map of the world and identifying the continents.  Ford kept wanting the maps to be about trains, so he'd interrupt to say things like, "And then Henry could come from this place and go down this street, and yada yada yada..." or Ruby would try to interrupt with things like, "My leotard is pink, my favorite color. Mama!  Mama!  My leotard is pink!"  I kind of lost it and had to have a long talk about how they wouldn't be invited back to Social Studies if they didn't learn the art of not interrupting!!  After that, it went very well, though, and I think Rachel enjoyed that lesson.  We just had such a great day yesterday that it was hard to have such a roller coaster day today.  I'm going to blame it on the fact that we ate Pop Tarts for breakfast.  Never again on a school day!!!

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