Sail On

Today Miss K continued her Columbus Day lesson by showing the kids a globe and tracing Christopher Columbus's route from Spain to North America. She and the kids discussed how long it would take to sail such a route (5 weeks), what the explorers would have needed to take with them on their ships, etc. They reviewed yesterday's songs and played the explorer game again, in which they hid North America somewhere in the classroom and searched for "new land."

All of the geography talk inspired Miss K's daughter to take a crack at the puzzle of North America...


...and I was thrilled that Miss D's son wanted to try the "game" (love it!) where we match objects to letters by their beginning sound:


My daughter used the moveable alphabet to spell out the names of some consonant/vowel/consonant phonetic objects...


...and then Miss D's son used the moveable alphabet to spell out the names of the objects from Laura's word drawers 1 and 2, which are made up the first 8 red letters: r, a, m, f, b, i, t, g.


Miss K's daughter built her "barn" :)...


...and then (hooray!) finally discovered the knobless cylinders. This blog's followers will know that I've been trying to get her to work with these for weeks now, because she enjoys building things, but for some reason they never "took." I think Miss K might have mentioned something about making a birthday cake for Daddy, and that was all the hook she needed:


Miss D's son got in on the knobless cylinder action...


...while my daughter and Miss K used the blindfold and the fabric box:


Once Miss K's daughter saw Miss D's son using the red knobless cylinders, she wanted to try building with all four sets:


Can you tell that Miss K's daughter is rubbing off on the other students in the classroom :) ?


Today Miss K's daughter tried this Sensorial puzzle:


She chose to make the ship in honor of Columbus Day.

At this point, Miss D's son wanted to try the teens board, which he saw my daughter do yesterday. I've mentioned before that he has really big paws hands, and for the life of him, he could not thread the unit into the two grooves to cover up the zero in the ten - you know what I mean? Bless his heart, he tried so hard, but he could only get one side to go in at a time, so that the unit would end up lopsided over the zero. Does anyone out there have any suggestions for making this easier? I'd truly appreciate any input.

After our work cycle, Miss D led Music Time. The kids used rhythm sticks, shakers, tambourines, and movement in a bunch of different songs, including some fall-, Halloween-, and Columbus Day-inspired ones. They love this part of their Tuesday and totally look forward to it each week.

We closed with the F verse and story from My ABC Bible Verses, and another day was in the books!