October Day 5 - Pig

Where have you seen a pig?  "At a farm."  I asked him about the fair.  Do you remember seeing pigs at the fair?

The first lesson today was with the I Can Write sheets.  I love these things.  Sometime I have one extra, depends on the number of kids I have on that day.  The last couple times we have gotten them I have had an extra and saved it.  I really want to get large laminating sheets so I can laminate the extra and then we can use it over and over again with a dry erase marker.  But for now I can fit most of one in these large reusable dry erase pockets I got off of Groupon, but I was eying them on Amazon first.

Sorry this photo is so small.  Not very good at affiliate links quite yet. 

For today's lesson, we wrote right on the paper.  Peter and Lucy were really excited about writing.  They picked which color highlighter they wanted and got to work.

I can't tell you how impressed I am with Ms. Lucy and her writing.  Look how well she holds the pen and how precise she is.  I don't have a picture of the letters she traced on the other side of this sheet, but I can tell you, she did just as well. 

Peter was holding his pen a little funny.  I tried to correct it but it didn't stick and I didn't want to frustrate him.  So I just let him go.  He still did pretty well and learning to enjoy writing is half the battle.

Next we learned a sign.  The question to start the lesson was, what do animals do that people shouldn't?  Lachlan went right to the idea of making a mess, which was the idea behind this lesson.  We talked about how piggies sometimes make messes.  Then in the description of the lesson it told us to have a child pretend to be messy and make mess.  Pretend, heck, who needs to pretend.  There were piles of toys out everywhere.  Soon after we started this discussion, Lachlan actually picked something up for me.  I signed thank you to him.  Then I had each of the children give it a try.  They liked it.  I was glad because in the past they hadn't shown much interest but recently they have.  They walk up to the sign language chart and ask how to do a sign and what it means.  We have been playing around with yes and no quite a bit. 

At dinner we played the Logic Game.  There were a couple sheets of cards to cut apart.  Instead of exact matching pairs there were pairs of things that go together.  I pulled out one and asked what goes with this?  Then I flipped through the other cards until we found one that went together.  There were some that seemed like they could have more than one answer, like the horse could go with the farmer too.  But when you started to whittle them down you could tell which ones were meant to go with each other. 

Here are a few of the pairs I laid out to grab a picture.  The toughest one was the sheep going with the sock.  I said "wait a second, sheep don't wear socks, do they?"  No, with a bunch of giggles followed.  "Well then, why do socks go with sheep (we knew they went together because they were our last two)?"  I told them that the farmers cut the sheep wool (their fur) and they can use it to make socks.  That was a pretty cool lesson.  I have a friend that spins her own yarn, we might just have to see if she will show the boys next time we come over. 

They LOVED this game.  We played it a few more times that night and it is still sitting on our dining room table to play again.