Emotions and Demonstration

Emotions

One of the things I wanted to work on this week with Rachel is interpreting body language.  How do we tell what someone is feeling if they don't use words to tell us.  This morning, while sitting on the couch reading and drinking our morning cocoa/coffee, the topic came up naturally.

Rachel brought over the book "Not a Box".  At one point, she commented on one of the illustration saying, "He's thinking." 

I asked her how she knew that, which prompted a lot of discussion.  Then, David started demonstrating other emotions for us.  

It was fun.

Then, later in the day, we went to the tile store where our tile order got totally and completely messed up.  I was exhausted and my patience was gone.  Later in the day, Rachel told Daddy that "we had fun, then Mommy got mad at the tile."

Ahem.  Great.  I will win no awards for parenting today.

Language Arts and Storytelling

Yesterday, while riding in the car, we passed the water tower near our house.  Rachel laughed and said the monkeys hadn't stolen it.  I asked her "Why?"  (The cheeky monkeys have been stealing the water tower for quite some time.)  She explained they couldn't steal it so they went home.  

"Home?  Where is that?"

Rachel replied, "In the jungle."

Mom, "Oh, what do you think they eat there?"

Rachel said, "Plants".

"Not bananas?"

Rachel, using that tone of voice that clearly says her mother is just old and daft, said, "No, they eat plants."

We then went through questions about how many monkeys there were (9), how big they were (pretty big, only 7 would fit int he car), when they were coming back (7 months), who stopped them from taking the water tower (cars).  We did a whole story, which is exactly what I want to encourage her to do.

Science (well, sort of, in the loosest sense of the word)

As we have been talking about seasons, I brought in the concept of months.  They cover this at playschool, so I thought it would work for us at home as well. We put up a big calendar on the door to the laundry room and every day she has moved a star to the date for the day.  The first time we moved the star, I was surprised, and chagrined, that she didn't know which direction to go for the next day. Duh.  I wasn't thinking.  So, I explained how things work.  Today, she did better, but what really stunned me was she counted to 30 with minimal help.

Resources

I also picked up some of the early Kumon workbooks on tracing patterns, letters and beginning to tell time.