Great start!

We had a good day today.  Everyone got their schoolwork finished and most of the time they were excited to do it.  Andrew loved his Clever Dragons and he practice counting, matching lowercase and uppercase letters and naming states.  I would read the state name, tell him where it was the first time and then in the next round when it repeated he would remember where it was on the map.  I knew he learned something when tonight while watching Hotel Impossible he recognized the state they were in - Florida.  He remembered that he had that on his game today.  If I had a map in front of him he probably could have found it.

We learned about gravity, air pressure and surface tension during Science.  We also watched a video that gave us a definition of science - do you know what the kids remembered about that video?  The blooper he had at the end where the teacher hurts his finger but none of them could give me a definition of science.  Guess I need to work on what to pay attention to during videos and the purpose of the videos.  Cairn did remember what surface tension meant and she remembered the formula (PIr2) - she can't tell you what it was for but she remembered the formula.

We played Pay Day and Cairn did all of her transactions in a check register.  She did a lot of practicing of adding and subtracting large numbers.  Skylar worked on simple addition (I took off the zeroes).  Andrew worked on paying attention and rolling dice correctly.  He tends to throw them in the air so they go all over the room.  We never finished the game so there was no winner or losers.

I started reading the Adventures of Robin Hood.  It was very interesting - the girls were coloring quietly at the table, Andrew was laying on me.  Everyone was perfectly quiet and they really listened.  After reading, I asked several questions and everyone knew the answers.  Late afternoon is a good time for read aloud time because everyone needs to slow down some and this was a good activity.  I used to read at lunch and it was tough getting everyone to listen - they were so busy moving and ready to do the next activity.

We also started learning about the Orchestra.  The first piece we listened to was Wagner's Ride of the Valkyries.  We learned that it is an opera about nine fairies who collect fallen heroes.  So I found this video.  We watched most of the it.  The kids really didn't like the opera singing but they loved the orchestra music.  They asked lots of questions about what was going on in the video.

Andrew also had a dentist appointment today to fill his one cavity.  He was very good.  He barely moved while they worked on him and he got a lot of compliments.  He doesn't like the way his tooth feels now and tonight when I felt it it did feel really rough.  I will call the dentist tomorrow to see if they can smooth it out.  It is the sides of the tooth that are rough - not the top where they put the filling.  He talked to me tonight about not wanting to do that again.  No more candy and lots of teeth brushing is what I told him.

The only thing we didn't get to today was starting our study of Colorado.  I can easily move that to tomorrow.