Real School Time...Today our daughter wanted some real school time during her brother's nap. So we went downstairs and worked at her desk, we did some punch and pull self-correcting math cards that helped her practice and learn addition. We worked together for about 10 minutes while I showed her how it worked and how to use her abacus to help her with the problem and then we put a stack of 10 problems ranging from 0+5 to 9+8 in the card holder and let her work by herself. She got every one right the first time! Of course she was using the abacus to visually do them, but I was still so proud of her and she was really enjoying it. Then we did some basic phonics work on the short vowel A, teaching her the sound and several words that started with it, having her trace with her finger and then practice writing it by herself and then we sounded out several three letter short a words. Then it was reading time, I read to her for about 20 minutes and then she had some free play time and a snack and then practiced some music on her keyboard and then practiced cutting with ribbon and yarn. All in all we probably worked together for about an hour and a half and she was so excited. Then we cleaned up and her brother woke up, perfect timing. In addition both kids practiced riding their bicycles in the street (with parents and helmets of course) - I still can't believe she is riding a two wheeler already!!!! The rest of the day was dedicated to free play and trying to stay cool in this heat. They really enjoyed our little pool and being chased by each other with buckets of water and having me spray them down with the hose.

I also got some more materials development done, laminating the file folders and working on sandpaper letters for our son to trace. I am tracing punch out letters onto sandpaper and then glueing them onto wood to make nice tacticle letters for the kids to work with. We also have some felt ones. I also made some more progress on our felt learning kits. Will probably be quiet here for the next few days as we have a bunch of out of town guests (again) and the holiday weekend. Hope all is well with you and your families!

Peace,
Tenn