a (short) week in review 1-25

We had a short school week this week. Both SweetPea and PorkChop and the older three as well. They had a long weekend for Martin Luther King Jr day so I made sure that the littles did too. Plus, its always nice to get to spend some extra time hanging out with all the siblings together with no expectations of getting "something" done.

Monday, PorkChop turned 18 months. I am still in shock that he is now officially halfway to two. Not that two is "terrible". Its just one more step away from being my baby boy and one step closer to being the little boy that I see coming out more and more each day.

all the boys playing DS together

Tuesday, SweetPea and I worked on learning who Martin Luther King Jr was and what he wanted to see. She has since spent the week reminding us how things need to be "fair and equal". Which means that she also thinks that she should get all the privileges of being a "big kid" without any of the responsibilities. Yes, we need to work some more on being "equal" around here. To help illustrate how all skin colors (races, nationalities, religions, etc) are "equal", we finger painted while discussing "If you had orange skin, could you ride a bus? Could you go to McDonald's if you had purple skin?" I was even pleasantly surprised to see PorkChop enjoying the finger paints for the first time ever.

our equality rainbow

 Wednesday, we worked on reviewing our letters. I took out our flash cards and went over the names of the letters that we have done so far (A-K). Then I laid them all out on the table and SweetPea had a scavenger hunt to find one item that began with each letter. Most we did in order. Others, she was too excited to wait and would jump up and run through the house yelling "D says Duh.... Duh... Duh... Dinosaur!" Others are still tripping her up. Like G. She can remember the soft G sound but has trouble remembering the hard G one. And E. Since her linus has been known to squeal "Eeeeee!" when its lost, she thought that she could use linus as her E sound. Cute try, but not really what I was looking for. PorkChop just wanted to eat the apples and grapes that were being used in this lesson.

What begins with the letter ___ ?

 Thursday, we switched gears and practiced our numbers. Recognizing them, putting them in order and showing how much each stood for by using small Reese's Pieces from the cooking cabinet. For some reason, no matter what tricks I try, SweetPea has a huge mental roadblock over the number 4. She just cannot get that one down. Even with numerous attempts, she still cannot recognize it, although she understands the value of 4, can count and include it and can write it. Weird. Since she isn't as strong on numbers as she is on letters, I broke out the board games to help. Many, many, MANY games of Chutes and Ladders, Hi-o Cherrio and Hungry, Hungry Hippo (yeah, nothing to do with math but how can you resist playing that game?) later.... she still cannot identify 4.

How many is the number ___ ?

 Today, we worked on flashcards again. And we worked with our number blocks. We had grand plans to bake cookies for practical math skills too. Instead? The temperature was double what it had been all week in the morning (we hit 20!) and it was softly snowing outside. Good intentions to stay indoors during our bitter cold days flew out the window! I bundled the three of us up and we spent 25 glorious minutes outside painting the snow, jumping over sticks twigs, and looking for our feline friends. We came in red cheeked and frozen fingered but much happier than we have been all week. Happy enough that when SweetPea asked for the colored rice bin, I consented and allowed them almost an hour of scooping, pouring and digging through our  once brightly colored grains.

snow dying fun

Next week, its back to the normal around here. The bigs all have a full five day school week, so SweetPea will too. I need to go back to teaching her a new letter, a new math skill (well, trying to) and to begin preparing for our Valentine's fun. But for now, I am going to just look back at our review week with some very fond memories and look forward to doing it again.