November's End

NOVEMBER Xing: We started our day off by breaking out the calendars, and the kids quickly figured out that today marked the end of November. So tomorrow we'll be making December calendars - and the kids get to open their first door on their chocolate advent calendars. Hoo boy!

For whatever reason, Annabelle was a mess this morning (someone has a case of the Mondays comes to mind). I had her working on some letter formation/penmanship worksheets. Because she taught herself how to write, she never went through the standard-formation-of-letters drill and that fact shows in her penmanship, so it's something we need to work on. But man, was she fighting it this morning, taking soooooooo loooong to do every letter and basically whining every step of the way. Good times.

Meanwhile, I had CJ doing worksheets where he had to differentiate between long and short vowel sounds. He had no trouble with the concept that each vowel makes a couple of different sounds, but he was having a real difficult time wrapping his head around the terms "long" and "short" as it pertained to those sounds. I finally thought to explain it that a vowel is long when it says its own name. That he got instantly and it stuck. He breezed through the exercises after that. Hooray!.

POP GOES THE BRAIN: Today we took BrainPOP for a free test drive. We watched a short video about the seasons. I'd guess that it was at about a third or fourth grade level, but CJ and Annabelle were able to keep up alright with some repeating of concepts and vocabulary new to them.

After the video, we took their online quiz, and we also completed a fill-in-the-blank story that basically recapped the story. While we were doing this, I got out their globe because I think a visual aide is really helpful when talking about things like the equator, the tropics, the Northern Hemisphere and the Southern Hemisphere.

SO LONG, SAM!: More than once today Annabelle said, "We've got to finish that darn Sam book." She was right. Today would be the day to say goodbye to "All About Sam." I have to admit, I'm glad it's over. The first couple of chapters were cute, but after that, it became a bit old in more ways than one - it was published in 1988, but IMHO, it read more like 1968. So now, it's time to find another chapter book. Perhaps something a bit more fantastic ...

IT COMPUTES: Given Annabelle's meltdown this morning, I decided against doing math worksheets today. Instead, we visited a couple of math-related Web sites, including FunBrain's math arcade and KinderWeb. On KinderWeb, they worked on their time telling skills, simple addition, subtraction and a coin value addition game. We hadn't done any coin work in awhile, so imagine my surprise (and happiness) when they both had total recall of each type of coin and its value. It's a breakthrough!

CHOIR PRACTICE: After a couple of days without singing, the kids did a pretty good job of remembering lyrics to the song they're learning. In fact, I think they could do it without a cheat sheet, but they don't think they can, so we'll work on building their confidence.

CLASSICAL GAS: During dinner, I had some Beethoven playing. "This is delightful dinner music," Annabelle remarked. One of the songs played was his Fifth Symphony. After we'd finished eating, I played "A Fifth of Beethoven" for them and they discoed down. Annabelle said she wanted to be a DJ and do "some scratchin' " so I gave her a slightly ribbed placemat and she rocked the house. (:

AFTERMATH: At noontime, I tuned the news on to see if they'd caught the suspect in the Lakewood police killings. The program showed photos of the officers and some footage of one of them with his young son. That was too much for Annabelle to bear - she started crying and said, "His family must miss him so much." :( I told her she was right and that the families aren't the only ones who miss the fallen officers. Their friends and co-workers all miss them terribly, too.

I suppose it could be argued that I shouldn't have turned the news on at all, but the reality of the situation is, well, this is reality. And, after she read the news on Sunday, Annabelle already knew what had happened, and the story is going to be all over the Internet, television and front pages for days and weeks to come. So we will continue to have a dialogue about it.