Fun and Games for Learning

 After looking critically at our day, I realized we had covered just about every subject! We had so much fun and played quite a few games along the way too.

Writing-- Evan and I worked on his letter to Santa while Alec and Ian both worked on their science fair project boards.  Alec tried to finish up his river otter facts while Ian typed up some of the definitions for the VCR parts.

Math-- The older boys took a math minute this morning and they both passed!  Then I gave a mini lesson on making improper fractions into mixed numbers.  This is a concept we've worked on once or twice before with no real headway but I had hoped that by playing a game together they'd be able to work together to gain greater understanding.  Well, they had so much fun playing On a Roll that they wanted another sheet of paper and to keep playing more rounds.  I was kicking myself for giving them my only copy.  I spent part of my afternoon looking online for another printout and told them they could play another day.  I found it here if you're interested.  They did great and they loved it!

While they played Evan and I played a game called Two Digit Big Man.  We took a deck of cards and each flipped over two cards.  We then made the biggest two digit number we could and the one with the highest number won and go to keep all the cards from that round.  At the end of the game we counted up to see who had more cards.  Alec and Evan played a round too.  I was happy to see that Evan could make the highest two digit number and tell me who won without even seeming to think about it. 

completed score cards-- they challenged themselves to compare
different fractions on the fifth and final round

91 versus 74-- "you loose mom!"

Reading-- Evan hopped around the room on his sight words cards, if he got a card wrong, or landed in the lava he had to start over.  I kept it light and fun and figured no matter how many times he might have to start over it would be great practice with his words.  I started following him around and were giggling and laughing.  He made a bunch of mistakes but told me this was lots of fun.  I found him and Alec playing with them again at various times throughout the day.  Evan and I also read Have You Seen My Cat? together.   Alec was reading books about river otters as he was working on his science fair project and Ian pulled a few books out of his book bin to read.  We read a bit more in Harry Potter before lunch too and it's really starting to get good now.

Science-- The older boys worked on their science fair projects today.  Since Evan is all done with his science fair project but still had not yet finished all the books we borrowed on them from the library, we read two more sea turtle books-- Into the Sea and Sea Turtles. 

We all examined the carved pumpkins again today too.  We ended up throwing them away once we studied them for a bit.  Ian's pumpkin had caved in completely and was sitting in a puddle of gooey water.  We saw splits in the seams of the pumpkin and noticed that it was much darker all around the outside.  Pikachu was growing mold so that his stripes, eyes and nose were now black.  Alec thought that was hilarious and totally fitting.  We examined the mold up close and debated about making a slide to put under out microscope but since no one wanted to touch it at all we decided that it wasn't necessary.

Geography-- We received our Hawaii postcard the other day and had not yet had a chance to read it so we sat down today and studied the pictures on the front of the card.  I read the back of the card and we all tried a hand at sounding out the Hawaiian words that were included.  We agreed that it must be hard to learn how to spell some of their words.  For example their state fish is called the humuhumunukunukuapua'a.  Now that's a mouthful!  We also received Idaho's postcard today and so we learned a bit about Idaho too.  I tried to sort of quiz the boys when the postcard came in; I covered up the name and asked if anyone knew where our nearest postcard was from.  Funny enough Alec answered Ihio... then argued he was half right. 


Spelling-- While I had not intended to touch on any spelling today they all ended up with a mini lesson in spelling.  Ian and Alec were working on spelling as they were writing and typing up their science fair reports but when Ian won the math game he tried to write winner down on his paper and spelled it winer.  I used that time to show them a mini lesson in doubling the last consonant on CVC words.  We them wrote up a few words using the rule.  While Evan and I were working on his letter to Santa I had him sounding out words and spelling some of his sight words for me, not that I was thinking we'd cover or sneak in spelling but we did.



     Evan and Ian worked to make all sorts of buildings and garages out of both our magna blocks and our foam building blocks at various times throughout the morning.  They were pretty creative with them and had fun working together.  Ian left around lunchtime to head out with my mother in law.  They were going to lunch, grocery shopping for an elderly relative, and then hitting a local store for some pre-Christmas wish list making.  The younger two asked if they could set up a carpet picnic for lunch and watch a bit of TV.  They set up the blanket, made their own lunches and decided on something to watch together. 

Foam block garages and towers

Magna block garage

Yummy carpet picnic