friday wrap-up

Busy week for us - lots of afternoon activities for the kids with their grandmas and a 'field trip' to the flea market for some school supplies. Like a bunch of buttons and some trays for their work to go on on their shelves.

*an aside, my living room is full of kids dancing to Just Dance and it's hard to concentrate because they're kind of hilarious and uncoordinated*

For our mornings though it really took until Wednesday to get our groove going. Guthrie was um, shall we say a little reluctant to really do much of anything except sit on the couch being surly. She's really fitting the mold of the "6 year change" these days. Loose teeth! Getting lanky, her face is changing to be less little girl. Lots of independence and lots of needing/wanting us to do things for her. And lots, lots of strong emotions. Which you would think we'd be used to, but really we had kind of a break from the seemingly irrational fits. Except now there's a lot of, 'why does everyone hate me?' 'i'm a terrible person' etc. It's hard to hear, even if I know it's as age appropriate as the loose teeth.

Anyways.

We did do some fun non-surly things!

We continued playing with snow dough this week - a mixture of cornstarch and vegetable oil and glitter, inspired by The Imagination Tree. Last week it was a one person activity but under orders to not get too wild they played for over an hour. I'm glad I took her advice to use vegetable oil instead of baby oil because the cat found it quite tasty!


We did some sorting work. I set out two bottles of various objects - noodles, sequins, beads, beans, and a ice cube tray. They can sort it all out and then count how many of each they have. Or whatever. Fine motor skills is what I was aiming for!


The story I told was Little Red Cap and I didn't do any activities to go with it, but no one seemed to notice. We sorted and added and sequenced buttons. Guthrie did a few pages in her new Explode the Code 1 workbook. She's never too excited about sitting down and doing it but once she gets going she will do several pages. Then during snack one day (captive audience) she built the words from the pages for me using her movable alphabet. Which led into a loud round of rhyming as they were all words that ended in -at. And then we talked about syllables. Which my musical kids super enjoyed.

My one complaint about Explode the Code is that I would much rather they teach her to write using a D'Nealian style. You know, with the tails? Instead of the block print they use. It's harder I think and not  as conducive to cursive. I'm trying to impress her with my tales - maybe she'll copy me because she thinks I'm so awesome. heh.

On Thursday we read The Ink Garden of Brother Theophane (a gift from John's dad for Christmas) and   I had her copy part of a snowflake poem that we are going to finish up and illustrate - much like Brother Theophane- next week. She made me do it with her. Do you know how hard it is to write on that handwriting paper? Goodness - it took me almost as long as it took her! You have to write so big!

The biggest hit was making blood. Guthrie is going back to the rheumatologist in a couple weeks and requested to learn some more about blood before then. Melissa at Chasing Cheerios posted this cool activity which she picked up from Pandia Press back in October and I tucked it away. The formula was:
1/2 c corn syrup for the plasma
1/2 c red hots candy for red blood cells
1 T lentils for platelets
5 dried lima beans for white blood cells

We started at circle time finding our veins and taking note of the fluctuations in our heart rate and pulse after jumping up and down for 30 seconds. None of this was new to Guthrie, but she enjoyed it nonetheless. Then we moved to the table and mixed up our blood while I explained the different parts and their jobs.

Later I overheard her telling Laithe and then 3 other people that her white blood cells are busy eating 3 different kinds of germs - HSP, a cold, and uh, ringworm. (whole other boring post largely about the 12 loads of laundry I had to do.) so I think it made sense to her.

She asked Laithe what his favorite part was and he said white blood cells, she said hers was platelets. The best part of the process was how true to life it was that the plasma was clear and that the only reason blood is red is because of red blood cells. It took about 2 hours for the red hots to transfer some of their color to the plasma. They kept coming back to it and it's still on the table. Getting a little funky.

Have a great weekend!