Today has been a marvellous homeschool day. After breakfast, Joshua started making hand gestures to illustrate letters, asking me to guess what each one was. Then he decided to move onto the play mat and use his whole body to represent the letters.
Then he asked me when we'd be "doing school" ... I didn't tell him he'd already been doing it for the last half hour.
After breakfast we all headed outside to finish painting the wood panels for the cubby house make over, this time with purple paint, and when the kiddos were all cleaned up I headed out to the gym, leaving them to play outside with Grandpa. Amazingly, they were still full of beans when I arrived home one and a half hours later with a nice bakery lunch.
Yesterday, as we've just finished The House at Pooh Corner by AA Milne, Grandpa read The Nightingale by Hans Christian Andersen to the kids, and this morning Joshua asked me if nightingales were real or pretend. I told him they were real, but he needed proof, so Grandpa took the kids on the internet after lunch and found some websites with fantastic pictures of birds, including the nightingale, and other sites with MP3 birdcalls (including nightingales and other animal voices) to listen to. The kids had a great time listening while I put Abigail to bed. I would not have guessed that zebras would sound like this!
For school, Joshua did a narration of The Nightingale and I transcribed part of it for his penmanship lesson. I told him that because he couldn't read most of the words, he had to put all his effort into tracing the letters neatly and correctly. He did a magnificent job, and commented "Soon I'll be even neater than you, Mum!" and today it really seemed like it. I was also proud of his attention to detail as he asked me what the apostrophe was and what it was for before he traced it. After he had finished the writing (two sentences - with no complaints!) he coloured in the picture I had found for him at Karen's Whimsy.
Meanwhile, Anna worked on her penmanship of the letter G and coloured in her picture from the Sesame Street alphabet quite nicely, although for much of it she chose black. I have to remind myself that she is only three. Sometimes I think my standards are too high as I compare what she can do now with what Joshua can do now. When I look back at what Joshua was doing at the beginning of this year (six months older than Anna's present age) and realise that she is already better than him, and I need to recognise her efforts.
As our grand finale, when the girls wake up from their naps, we're going to bake gingerbread men together for dessert (and for me to take for supper tonight at my GEMs mothers' group meeting.)
It has been a wonderful day.
Then he asked me when we'd be "doing school" ... I didn't tell him he'd already been doing it for the last half hour.After breakfast we all headed outside to finish painting the wood panels for the cubby house make over, this time with purple paint, and when the kiddos were all cleaned up I headed out to the gym, leaving them to play outside with Grandpa. Amazingly, they were still full of beans when I arrived home one and a half hours later with a nice bakery lunch.
Yesterday, as we've just finished The House at Pooh Corner by AA Milne, Grandpa read The Nightingale by Hans Christian Andersen to the kids, and this morning Joshua asked me if nightingales were real or pretend. I told him they were real, but he needed proof, so Grandpa took the kids on the internet after lunch and found some websites with fantastic pictures of birds, including the nightingale, and other sites with MP3 birdcalls (including nightingales and other animal voices) to listen to. The kids had a great time listening while I put Abigail to bed. I would not have guessed that zebras would sound like this!
For school, Joshua did a narration of The Nightingale and I transcribed part of it for his penmanship lesson. I told him that because he couldn't read most of the words, he had to put all his effort into tracing the letters neatly and correctly. He did a magnificent job, and commented "Soon I'll be even neater than you, Mum!" and today it really seemed like it. I was also proud of his attention to detail as he asked me what the apostrophe was and what it was for before he traced it. After he had finished the writing (two sentences - with no complaints!) he coloured in the picture I had found for him at Karen's Whimsy.
Meanwhile, Anna worked on her penmanship of the letter G and coloured in her picture from the Sesame Street alphabet quite nicely, although for much of it she chose black. I have to remind myself that she is only three. Sometimes I think my standards are too high as I compare what she can do now with what Joshua can do now. When I look back at what Joshua was doing at the beginning of this year (six months older than Anna's present age) and realise that she is already better than him, and I need to recognise her efforts.
As our grand finale, when the girls wake up from their naps, we're going to bake gingerbread men together for dessert (and for me to take for supper tonight at my GEMs mothers' group meeting.)
It has been a wonderful day.
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