Papa Piccolo

We have truly enjoyed this book.  It raised a lot of interesting ideas, such as, what happens to animals that have no home and what happens to children who have no parents or caregivers.  It was a surprise to her to hear that not all children are loved.

She practiced sorting and charting using kitties.

She practiced writing.  She has completed both the upper and lower case letter books, so I am printing out a variety of words from our stories for her to practice writing.  Additionally, she practices writing her name.

We had a great lunch at our local Italian deli and bakery.  Rachel has discovered she loves lasagne and I let her pick out a small dessert from the case.

We got out the water colours and oil pastels.  After a couple of drawings, we discovered it was more fun to paint kleenex and put them up on the windows and doors.

Our best idea was to build Venice in Lego.  We put down some blue fabric, and then built Venice, added boats and held a regatta.  She also took some of her charting kitties and put them on the bridge, like in the story.  Note that she even put the kittens in the black gondola.

She ran upstairs and grabbed her bath toys.

She added gondoliers.

Sophia, Ceasar, and Papa Piccolo on the bridge.  Marco and Polo are in the black gondola.

Katy and the Big Snow

We're doing Katy and the Big Snow this week.  I really don't like the book all that much.  I find, with my eyesight being so bad, that the map and print around the edges of some of the pages is just too hard to read.   Plus, it is boring.  There. I said it.  Even Rachel finds it boring.

However, we are going to use it as a starting point for a lot of mapping activities.  This morning we drew a map of Geopolis and put stickers from the book on it.  We had already covered the basic compass and today we added NE, SE, NW and SW.  We played games where airplanes and cars had to fly in a certain direction.  We also went geocaching yesterday.

Geocaching with our friend Courtney.  We went to the Toronto Botanical Gardens.

Map of Geopolis plus cars and stickers...and an airplane at the airport.

We took a week off from writing mainly because I was waiting for books to arrive and spent the time last week setting up a place in our library for us to work and store her materials.  We added an Expedit from IKEA to hold stuff.  We also added a little table and two chairs. Et voila!

So, we're back to writing today (Monday).  One page of numbers 1-10 and one page of lowercase letters.  Plus, she wrote her name four times.

She discovered mazes about four months ago and adores them.

We also did another page in her Mapping Book.

This was a great exercise in both listening and following verbal directions.  I gave her verbal clues like  "The  knight  is between a tree and a bush."

We played some fun math games using our cuisenaire rods.  In one game, David and she took turns mimicking each other in building different structures. Or David would build two structures and she would tell him what was different.

We also did some basic math and counting with the rods.  She would work out the addition problem and then check under the corresponding basket to see if Ping is there.  (This game was quite popular from the week we did The Story About Ping.)


I'm in a quandary of sorts.  She has the attention span of a, well, almost four year old.  However, intellectually, she is doing SK/1st grade work in math.  She has the fine motor coordination appropriate for her age.  Yet, she has figured out how to play Minecraft using the mouse in one hand and actually chording keys with the other to jump and move forward at the same time.

I created a world in Minecraft with a compass and hid things in it for her to find.


And....we had a LOT of rain this week.  Do you see any parallels between our lab and Rachel?