Waverly, dressed in her pretty princess dress from Aunt Kari - so cute! She looked like a little doll :-)
Caught the tail end of a smile...
This picture cracks me up - Scarlett holding Waverly, who was going totally cross-eyed trying to focus on the skylight in the kitchen! lol
While I worked with Lincoln, I set the girls up with a stack of tangram cards and a bin of pattern blocks. Not only are they fun and challenging, but tangrams help teach kids how to think critically about spacial relationships. (Victoria's completed Parrot)
Scarlett's completed Traffic Cop.
Meanwhile, Lincoln was working on reviewing nine sounds, plus one site word ("the") and four short words (his favorite - "but," haha :-) plus "cat," "ab," and "bat"). I quizzed him on the sounds by asking him to point to the sounds I said, then we practiced all of the words, and for a special treat I placed one m&m on each sound card. To earn the m&m on that card he had to say the sound correctly without any help and without any prompts. He earned all but one! Good job, buddy.
I love this girl! This expression is ALL Victoria :-) Showing off her completed Bunny tangram.
Next, Lincoln counted out plastic beans to place on each number card. Great practice for counting, and also for number recognition - he still struggles with identifying the number seven (he often thinks it's one). No problem counting to seven, just identifying the numeral itself, so we will have to be working on that particular one.
Bear sequence cards! Lincoln always has something different in mind for these little guys. He humors me by finishing the patterns, but then he often likes to lay out all of the bears that coordinate with the matching pattern, or make a mirror image row by placing the same bears above the existing row but upside down :-p
Linc and J had fun with the bears for quite a while, although I think J was stressed out by Lincoln's unorthodox methods... "Mrs. Wright! Lincoln is laying the bears sideways even when they're not sideways on the card!" haha
While the boys were finishing up, I pulled out the lacing cards for the girls. Sometimes I will mentally dismiss a set of manipulatives that I have as being "too old" or "too baby-ish" for the girls, but then find that they are ready sooner for this one thing, or still interested in another. I told them these lacing cards would be great practicing for perfecting their sewing technique. At first, Scarlett whipstitched all of her lacing cards, but then she got the hang of the back and forth threading maneuver.
Victoria was struggling a bit (mostly because she did not pull her thread through completely which creates tangles that are frustrating), but I helped her and then Gram spent quite a while working with her, and she got it! I was very impressed by her diligence. She is a lot like me, both good and bad - we expect things to come easily and yay for us!, a lot does. But then when it doesn't come easily, we can lose our minds in a short amount of time ;-) She is already light years ahead of me though on this end, and although she got frustrated, she didn't give up and plugged away at it until she did it! Good job, Sis.
After reviewing the blends and site word cards again, Victoria rocketed through an entire book today! She is only required to read 4 pages each day, but can read as much as she wants and today was feeling very confident and did a terrific job finishing a new book. It is very tempting to her to contextually fill in words instead of reading what is written (substitute "in" for "on" or "a" for "the"). Over the past couple of weeks she has made such improvement reading what is actually on the page.
Scarlett opted to take the new book she was going to start, "Olivia and the Easter Egg Hunt," and go to her room to start reading it to herself first. Wow! Her reading out loud to me was so much more fluid as a result. I can tell she is really hearing the story in her mind, as her inflections are spot on. Nice work, Scarlett!
By the time Meredith arrived, everyone was hungry for lunch! Gram had seen a yummy looking recipe for oven baked tacos on Facebook, so we decided to give them a try. I knew chances weren't good that my crew would eat them in a shell, so we gave them tortilla chips and the "guts" of the tacos (beans, meat and salsa) as dip and they gobbled it up.
Ours didn't look as amazing as the picture on FB, but they sure did taste great! This will definitely be a recipe we revisit soon.
Victoria, Meredith and Scarlett in the pool post-lunch.
Meredith was such a trooper and played hard with the kids in the pool for an hour!
Lincoln got in the pool enough to show off that he would jump in from the side and the diving board, but then he mostly laid out on his towel and watched the antics.
My little sunshine baby finally woke up after an epic three hour nap in time to visit with Meredith for a while.
The kids had hit that 2:30 wall of exhaustion, and so I had them lay out pillows and blankets in the living room and plied them with air-popped popcorn and their favorite juice (orange + pineapple) while they watched a movie and regained their energy.
By 5:00 p.m., all of our guests had departed and it was time to play around the house, take baths and get dinner around. Jim got home later than usual around 7:30 and we realized we still had not retrieved Lincoln's most beloved stuffed animal 'BearBear' from the restaurant where he'd been mistakenly left behind the previous night. So I hopped in the van and spent forty minutes driving to make sure our little guy had his bear in time for bed. Lincoln was quite anxious about him, so I sent a proof-of-life picture to ease his mind ;-)
No comments:
Post a Comment