General Conference is coming! General Conference is coming!
It is such a wonderful feeling to be able to stay home, have fun treats and snacks, and listen to the prophet. I am so grateful for technological progress.
Religion - After our prayer, pledge and scripture memorization we started our week of preparing for General Conference. Today we did conference countdown chains and used the ideas from this blog. I had a treat in one bag and nothing in the other. I think, in retrospect, it would have worked better to have something worthless, like paper or trash in the "empty" bag so that it wasn't quite so obvious which bag was the better deal. I also scolded the kids for standing up and trying to grab the bags out of my hand so we didn't get off to the best start. After they saw the treat, they perked up a bit. We had a good discussion about how the general authorities of the church prepare for conference and how we can prepare to be good listeners. Racer and Chicklette also did a couple pages of their other religion work today.
Math - Everyone did their math today. Sunshine on Funnix, Racer on CTC Math, and Turtle and Chicklette on Math Mammoth. Chicklette made some silly errors on her math and she's not going to be happy about that.
Handwriting - Sunshine and Ladybug practiced their cursive lower case a's in their rice trays and on the Magnadoodle board. We still need to work on getting them going the right way. Ladybug definitely has a better handle on it.
Science - For Sunshine, Ladybug, and their hangers-on, we played with prisms. I guess I only have one prism; I thought I had more. Anyways, they all liked playing Spot the Rainbow and then we went inside to draw our own rainbows. We had to have a little talk about comparison since Sunshine kept saying that his rainbow was prettier than Ladybug's. Privately, I think Ladybug's was better, but I just said we didn't need to compare and we could all like our own rainbows or everyone's rainbows. For the older kids, we did some copywork and dictation related to our lesson about moss and then they made a picture of a peat bog. It's an abstract art concept. That's all I'm saying.
History - We talked about Muhammad's Hegira today. The kids kept picking out similarities between the beginning of the Muslim religion and the LDS religion. They both started with six members and they both experienced persecution at the outset of their proselytization. Both religions are committed to honesty and caring for the poor.
All About Reading - The kids all like the activities in All About Reading. I thought some of them might be a little juvenile, but even my nine-year-old who is in Level 4 still likes to read the words on the gophers and then slide them through the hole. The highlight of Ladybug's day was after finishing her fluency sheet, she exclaimed, "I didn't cry at all!" She struggles a little with putting the sounds together, but we got through the rest of the phrases and sentences on the sheet and she did great.