January Review: Part Two

Georgia started taking gymnastics classes at the YMCA this month. She really enjoys it and always has so much fun. Olivia was going to take the Tumble Tots class, but she decided last minute that she really did not want to. Same thing that happened with the swimming class. She just isn't ready. Her temperament is hard to work with sometimes. She does enjoy watching Georgia with her class, and practicing new moves at home. The girls will sometimes pull all the pillows from the house and put them on the floor as an impromptu gym mat.

Olivia has been doing different activities to work her fine motor skills and hand muscles that are necessary for writing. One project she enjoys is making bead jewelry.

She also loves "playing" on the computer. She likes Reader Rabbit, Jumpstart Kindergarten, I Spy, and going to PBSkids.org. She's been using the computer since she was two years old. These programs help Olivia with practicing and learning new skills, such as; pre-reading, counting, similarities and differences, ordering, sequencing, and a lot more.

Another activity Olivia likes is what we call her Number Cups. I took some plastic Dixie cups and wrote a number on each. We started with one through five. Then she has something to count, either gummy bears, m&ms, cheerios, or whatever we have that day. I put a pile of one, two, three, four, or five in front of her and she has to count them, and then identify the correct number on the cup, and put them in it. Then, when the cups are all filled, we dump them out again, and she has to sort them into the cups herself. And of course, when it is all over she gets to eat the snack. She loves that part.

We have also been working on getting Olivia to know her lower-case letters, too. We have some Go Fish cards that match upper and lower-cases together. I also have an Alphabet Mat I made, where Olivia has to match magnetic letters to their mate.

We made up the "Blue Goo" recipe in Olivia's National Geographic Little Kids Magazine. It's the cornstarch and water concoction that is also called Oobleck. I used to love to play with this stuff when I was younger. It is so weird. The recipe is one (16 oz.) box of cornstarch, 1 and 1/2 cups of water, and about 15 drops of food coloring. We used blue as in the magazine. But you could use any color, or keep it white. If it gets a little dry while you are playing, just add some water.

This month, the girls went roller-skating for the first time. It had been about twenty years since Mark or I had gone. Scary!! But we had a lot of fun. It was a birthday party for a girl in Georgia's gymnastics class.

Other topics reviewed, studied, or discussed in January were:
Antarctica, Arctic, tundra, penguins, whales, seals, adaptations, animal communication, pollution, poisonous animals around the world, conjoined twins, why we have belly buttons, verbs, nouns, pronouns, KWL chart, Venn diagram, wrote and illustrated a book on Flamingos, chapter books, oral book report, research project, highlighting, note taking, rough draft, editing, final draft, writing journal, charts, math word problems, percentages, time and money game, pre-algebra subtraction and addition, seasons and Earth's tilt, Arctic culture, finished Africa, global interdependency, US states and capitals game, human body and reproduction, drawing, painting, sculpting, singing, and dancing.

Some of the things listed seem out of place. If Georgia is interested in something or has a question about something, we will explore that topic. (For example, she wanted to know how big a giant squid's eye was. We found out it is about the size of a man's head, and is the largest eye in the world.) I have a rough goal for each quarter, month, week, and day, but I also follow her interests as well. We have a lot of fun learning new things!

I just wanted to mention that we have finished our Antarctica study, and as a final project Georgia created a lapbook. I will make a post on this later.