Christmas Morning and beyond

Christmas Morning:






Playing with his marble run in his room:





Wherever Dallin--and his phone--are, Preston is sure to be.




Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

December school

Image
Once a week or so we do a therapeutic drawing activity called form drawing.  Basically it is drawing patterns of straight and/or curved lines.  It is great preparation for handwriting.  Prior to actually drawing the forms on paper, we try to get them into his body by having him walk or run the patterns, or by using various body parts to "draw" them large on the wall or in the air.  He really got into this one!  He wanted to make many more graduated lines than what were required.  (He realized he accidentally drew this with yellow, so of course he had to go back and redo it with blue chalk.  LOL, he cracks me up!)  We also try to paint every week or two.  In our first grade, the paintings are all color exercises, set to stories.  This one was a story about squirrels snuggled up in their hollow tree for the winter, the story was intended to highlight the cool blue surrounded by the warm red.  Preston is a fairly meticulous painter--he made five "sha
Read more

October Photo Dump

Image
 Most of these pictures are of hikes, because we've been doing a lot of them. I aim for once a week.   It is so beautiful where we live!  Preston says this is his favorite trail we've found so far. In October we started a unit based on the book Farmer Boy.  We dyed yarn on the stove using natural items--red cabbage, grapes, etc.  Preston was very proud of our efforts.  We also went to an Apple Festival at a local farm.  Preston did this ball toss activity and won three goldfish.  The kids goofing off. Dallin and Preston tried their hand at this giant sling shot at the festival.  Continuing with our Farmer Boy lessons, we talked about food preservation and dried apples in the oven. More hiking!  Still wild raspberries in October!  Math--hands on experience with factoring, and then he drew it on the chalkboard. This time we took Dallin on our hike.
Read more
Preston is continuing to enjoy school.  One thing that is a huge part of first grade for us is the telling of fairy tales.  I believe that the archetypal symbols in fairy tales are important for young children, and that they really relate to them.  So each week during this language arts unit, I tell a new fairy tale that forms the basis for our learning for that week.  Story time is Preston's favorite part of school, and every day he asks if we are going to have a story and if it can be the *first* thing we do.  (Usually it's last--I like to use it as a bit of bait to get him through the other parts of school.)  We did have one fairy tale that proved to be a bit of a disaster.  I learned that Hansel and Gretel was too scary for him, which was proven when he ran from the table in the middle of it and refused to hear the rest.  Lesson learned!  I didn't try to force the issue, and before the next morning I'd looked through and chosen a different story, The Fishermen and H
Read more