Homeschooling at it's best!

Wow! What an amazing day of homeschooling! I usually just let the learning happen spontaneously but today Thomas was particularly hungry for new material so we tried some structured activities I had ready. I was just waiting for the right time and this was it. We started with tracing shapes and letters in a tray of rice - same idea as the Montessori sand tray. This is a great exercise to get ready for writing. They get to practice using the muscles in their fingers, hands, and arms to form letters but they don't have to worry about holding a writing utensil.

After the rice tray warm up, Thomas was ready to write in his new workbook. We sat down together to do the first few pages. It took every bit of his concentration and I could tell that he was a little frustrated that he couldn't trace the shapes exactly right.

After a little snack and some time on the computer, Thomas wanted to play with the sorting beads. This is one of our "school work" activities that I keep out of reach. It only comes out when the room is clean and we are ready to concentrate. This is also a Montessori type activity. Thomas sat quietly sorting and stacking while Jacob and I got ready for nap time. When Thomas was done he put all of the pieces neatly back in the box, put the lid on and asked me to put it back up on the shelf!

For nap time Jacob wanted to read all of his Vegggietales books and picked one of my favorite Berenstain Bears - The Missing Dinosaur Bone.

While Jacob was napping, Thomas and I played train math on our new grid board.

It was Thomas's idea to line up his train magnets on the grid then I decided to turn it into a math lesson. We counted trains, talked about more and less, big and small, and did some simple addition and subtraction.

When we were all done, Thomas wanted to show me one last "trick". He pulled all the trains off the board and said, "Now there are ZERO!"