Butterflies and Symmetry

Our homeschool group took a field trip to the Norfolk Botanical Gardens.  The girls loved it!  We will definitely be going back.  These are the books we read over the previous week.  We also covered symmetry because it fit in so nicely with the butterflies. 

Patterns

Recently, my grandma sent C these big Popsicle sticks. I think she sent them for arts and crafts, but little did my grandma know that these are perfect for manipulatives! So, today we worked on patterns. This was the first time I directly introduced the concept to C, although I'm sure she's seen them on a few educational shows. She did really well.

We first worked on AB patterns, and that seemed a little easy. She also did well on AABB and AAB patterns. I even threw in a third color, and she was able to finish the patterns. She then wanted to start being the teacher, and made her own patterns for me to finish. This was a fun hands on math activity, and I think she really enjoyed it.
We've also been working on rhyming words, counting to twenty, concept of telling time, and of course reading a ton. She's also been working on spelling on her own. The other day, she was writing out valentine's cards for us, and she was trying to spell "daddy." She spelled the dad part. For her sister, Delilah, she spelled DLL, so I can tell she's recognizing the consonants, but not all of the vowels. She can hear the vowels if I sound out a word one letter at a time, but she's not doing that on her own yet. It's so exciting to watch her progression.

Simple Addition

Today while baking cupcakes for a party Carlee would be attending this afternoon, we were measuring the ingredients. "We need two cups of flour," I told Carlee. I let her scoop one cup of flour out and pour it into our bowl. "Remember, we need two cups of flour, how many more do we need?" I decided to ask this question out of the blue. I was simply going to introduce the topic to her, and I honestly completely expected her to answer "two," since I had just reiterated that we would need two cups of flour.

To my surprise, she answered, "One more." Wow. It's amazing how much kids know/learn/pick up on their own. I might just try adding more simple addition and subtraction problems into our activities to see just how much she understands.