School-time and fun on the weekends

Here in Colorado, school has begun for many districts (our district begins today). Anyway, I decided that we should start working off some of the stuff I have planned for this semester and then if we take time off when baby comes, no big deal. This past week we used The Story About Ping by Marjorie Flack. The kids loved putting our little disk with Ping on China every day and we learned about China and Ducks and Water safety. We also played some fun math games. Friday's math lesson stole the show (mostly because it was edible). The children sorted six different types of dry food into muffin tins and then we counted the pieces of food. To emphasize the base 10 concept there were ten pieces of each food and Tristan counted out five of each to share with Ana, which left five for him to eat. By the end, I think they understood that six tens is sixty and half of ten is five, but....who knows what they actually took away?:)

I still haven't been able to resist alphabet books at the Library! This past week we got ABCers by Carole Schaefer. It made me very excited when Tristan pointed out that they skipped D and then, confusedly tried to figure how they could possibly have jumped from E to R. That was a good opportunity for a phonics/reading lesson about how letters make words and this book was trying to make a word instead of just listing the letters of the alphabet.
We have also checked out some fun books on numbers. Marcie Aboff's If You Were an Even Number and If You Were an Odd Number, these books are awesome! Both Tristan and Anastasia enjoyed them, though I'm not sure they understood everything. We got Orla Kiely's Numbers book. It is a good one for Ana to look at and the pictures are nice for counting practice for Tristan. We also enjoyed Toasty Toes counting by tens by Michael Dahl. I'm not a huge fan of the illustrations, however, the book is fun and introduces counting by tens nicely.
 
Anyway, enough about School and books. This weekend we decided to enjoy the weather and go outside. We hiked our favorite Garden of the Gods trail Saturday morning and then we went out to see the Airforce football team practice and we met the Mascot and got to run around the field for kid's day. Sunday, after early church, we visited the Dinosaur Resource center in Woodland park. It was interesting. I learned some things and the kids enjoyed the play area, though some of the bones were a little scary! There was a full T-rex in there! And the biggest sea turtle I have ever seen!!




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