Back to Homeschooling- Snow Day

We ended up taking a very long break for Christmas and haven't done hardly any school in months.  I don't feel guilty about it.  Taking unexpected, unscheduled, and unauthorized breaks is why we homeschool.  Ironically, we started back at school just when a big dumping brought a week of snow days to the public schools.

Skimmer recently took scissors to his own head, reminding me that I haven't given him (and all of them) enough cutting practice.  I set up "stations" on the table that the kids took turns using.  One station was a piece of cardboard, colored paper, and a giant push pin for poking.  They're obsessed with poking right now so this was a hit.  Dragonfly worked on her name.  I was busy making sure that all the activities were painless and didn't get a picture of it.  Bummer.


Another station was a bowl of yarn for snipping.  Skimmer thought cutting all that yarn from big strands to tiny half-inch pieces was the best.  He worked really hard on maintaining the correct hand posture while cutting.



The second cutting station was just scrap paper and scissor.  Tadpole was using trainer scissors and just focusing on snipping.  He loved the destruction part of cutting and kept laughing.


Skimmer also begged me to "do math" with him this week.  I wasn't exactly sure where to start, so I made a counting game for him.  We started with a pile of counters in the middle, and then gave each of us bowls.  We took turns rolling a 1-3 sided dice and counting out how many we got.  I had him put the counters on the table before adding them to his bank to check his counting.  There were too many steps for him to follow so he struggled with the sequence.  It also revealed that he didn't know what numbers meant or what they looked like.  I now have a good idea of where to go next.  And, like I said, he is motivated right now.

I also noticed that he had trouble using picking up the small counters that we used, so I know we need to work more on his fine motor stills (he's completely gross motor skills driven).  This was good too because it helped me focus on what things he needs to work on there, too.  More pinching, transferring, and poking!

Dragonfly and I planned the "gone game" as well, but I gave her a regular 6-sided dice with numbers written on it (printable).  She loved the game; however, it was way too easy for her!  I'd like to switch to a 10-sided dice and have her count pennies next time.  Her math workbook has introduced her to pennies and dimes so I'd like to have her count pennies and then grab dimes when we roll a 10.  The best part is at the end of the game, when we have to count all the change.

I broke the blogger rule and didn't get good pictures of our math game, but here's another picture of snow:

So, I guess you can say that this week was sort of an assessment week for us.  My goal for next week is to have our activities set up in the work box drawers, so that I can school them all together.

One more snow picture:



And next week is Valentine's Day so we'll be having our special "Family Date Night!"