For our final day with Katy and the Big Snow, we went back down to the block city Alex created in the basement, bringing along some little dolls and animals. Katy features maps and compass directions prominently in both the text and the illustrations. I drew a correctly oriented compass rose on the basement floor. [...]
Read the rest of Cardinal directions.
Everything went a lot smoother today. Alex says it’s because she slept better last night. Maybe so.
This morning she and I made pictures of snowy scenes. We drew outdoor scenes with markers on colored paper and then splattered watered-down white poster paint on top to make falling snow. We both enjoyed ourselves. It seems to [...]
Read the rest of Emerging from the blizzard.
This was our sixth day of being snowed in, and the strain is definitely beginning to show. You can pretty much assume that all the activities I describe here happened before a meltdown or after a meltdown.
There were blizzard conditions all day, so much so that we didn’t allow Alex to go outside. We did [...]
Read the rest of Snow, snow, snow.
In Katy and the Big Snow, essential city services are paralyzed by the snowstorm. They need Katy to dig them out so that they can perform their functions: the fire department needs to put out a fire, the doctor needs to get a patient to the hospital, the water department needs to fix a broken [...]
Read the rest of Katy, Day 2.
We’re snowed in.
Over the weekend, we got more than two feet of snow, the most ever recorded in one snowfall in Baltimore. Tomorrow, the National Weather Service is predicting that we’ll get hit with another 10-20 inches. It could be a long time before we can go any further than the garden with the kids. [...]
Read the rest of Alex and the Big Snow.
Yesterday I got my grant application in to NIH, so now I have time to post a wrap-up of our Five in a Row practice week with Madeline and my impressions of the curriculum now that I’ve tried it out.
I enjoyed the experience of immersing our family in one book and one set of topics [...]
Read the rest of Five in a Row practice week: Recap and review.
Posted by Michael
Our subject for the fourth day was “Art”.The plan was to find some landmarks shown in Madeline (such as the Louvre, the Eiffel Tower, Notre Dame — see this tour guide for all eight places), match them up with pictures, and then go on to talk about how an artist’s drawing might not [...]
Read the rest of FIAR practice week: Day 4.
I know this is only the fourth day you’re seeing, but today was our last day of our Five in a Row practice run. Michael is still planning to write up and post yesterday’s art lesson, while I go ahead and post about today.
Our subject on the fifth day was “Applied Math.” Five in a [...]
Read the rest of FIAR practice week: Day 5
Today was the Science day of our Madeline study. The suggested science lessons in the Five in a Row manual didn’t really grab me, so I freelanced.
In the book, Madeline gets appendicitis and is rushed to the hospital for surgery. After we read the book through, I brought out our copy of Pop Up Facts: [...]
Read the rest of FIAR practice week: Day 3.
In the usual way of things, each day of Five in a Row focuses on a different subject. Yesterday was Social Studies; today was supposed to be devoted to Language Arts. But of course learning doesn’t divide itself up neatly like that. We took an immediate detour, first thing, when Alex picked up Madeline and [...]
Read the rest of FIAR practice week: Day 2.
Michael and I both worked a full day today, and then we were all invited to a party in the evening. So our first day of Five in a Row was pretty brief.
We read Madeline, as we will every day through Sunday. While we read it we talked a bit about the scenes that were [...]
Read the rest of FIAR practice week: Day 1.
We’re going to have five consecutive days (Wednesday-Sunday) at home with no nursery school after coming home from our post-Christmas trip to Memphis. Michael has to work on Wednesday and Thursday, but after that it will be all of us together.
It seemed like it might be a good idea to use that five-day stretch for [...]
Read the rest of Practice run.