Snowy Day!

It didn't snow this week but that didn't stop us from reading some great books about snow days and snowmen. There were so many cool activities I found for a snow theme that we didn't get to all of them, so we may sneak a couple into next week when we read The Mitten by Jan Brett.

Henry is getting faster at reading and spelling words. Other than reading aloud and along with him, we also practiced some silent e words and now he is much better at pronouncing silent e words quickly. Before when he saw a word like "make", he would say "mack, no wait, make." Now he is much faster at seeing the whole word and saying it correctly. We'll probably continue practicing the silent e words this week, maybe with some vowel-r-silent e words because I think those can be tricky.

He is also more interested in holding pencils. He didn't want to write letters but likes those printable worksheets where you trace a path from one object to another. He also did some dot-to-dot worksheets and some regular old coloring. I'll be ordering more FLIP crayons from rainbow resource because we've worn ours down to nothing. I'll probably also order some new do-a-dot markers just for fun.

I backed off doing any kind of math this past week.

We opened up our first continent box, Antarctica! Henry absolutely loved it. We have a little ball that looks like a globe, an inflatable globe, and a big map of the world on the wall. We found Antarctica on all of them. We read books from the library and tried watching March of the Penguins. I have to say I was glad Henry wasn't that in to it, that movie is sad! I think his favorite thing about Antarctica is spelling it. It's probably the biggest word he knows and he gets a kick out of it.

We listened to Winnie the Pooh by A.A. Milne on cd from the library. The first chapter I played he almost ignored it, running around the house. His attention span got much longer as we continued, and now he'll sometimes ask for two chapters, but I've found one is more where he is at this time.

We've been reading one devotion from Gotta Have God Devotions for Boys each morning. Now that Henry is a bit older, the ABC Jesus Loves me curriculum is more his speed in terms of the Bible stories, so we're following that schedule again. Next week is Jesus Feeding the 5000, which should be fun!

I play classical music during some of our down time, but haven't put up our composer of the month pictures yet. I am going to do the Artist of the Month first I think, starting with Picasso because he is fun. I got some books from the library and googled coloring pages for Picasso's paintings - it is amazing how many there were! We will hopefully start the Artists this week and the composers a couple weeks later.

I think I'm mellowing out as we go. I used to feel so bad if we didn't do something I had planned or if I changed the plan or dropped something. Now I'm realizing that those decisions were usually made not because we are lazy or ineffective, but because that was what was best for us at the time. If Henry isn't ready for something he isn't ready. In the same way, if he is ready to read why do we need to wait on someone else's schedule to do it?