J-jo doesn’t like things rolling around. He was extremely bothered by the above work. To decrease J-jo’s frustration with the bead stair without spending a penny, I browsed through my stores of craft material for inspiration and came up with this:

 Lay out your bead stair on top of the craft foam and trace around the triangle.  With an exacto knife, cut out the traced triangle.  Glue that piece of foam (the one with the triangle cut out) on top of another two pieces of craft foam and voila, a bead stair tray. End of frustration.

Bear did parts of a turtle cards and nomenclature book.  You can find some from Montessori Print Shop.
I have a CD of three-part cards I won two years ago but didn’t like their turtle cards, which were clipart, not realistic.  I didn’t feel like paying for their new ones, which are nice.  I found the ones we ended up using at Montessori Materials.  Bear made her own cover.

 
Both J-jo and Bear did the turtle shape craft from Mama Jenn.  I use her print outs every week for MFW K, but we don’t do the copywork.  Bear does so much other copywork that doing this would be too much and obviously, J-jo can’t write yet.

 
This is a cute turtle rhyme from PreKinders.

This is my turtle.
(Make fist, extend thumb)
He lives in a shell.
(Hide thumb in fist)
He likes his home very well.
He pokes his head out when he wants to eat.
(Extend thumb)
And pulls it back when he wants to sleep.

I had this turtle pattern block mat from Prekinders printed from ages ago.  Neither kid was very interested.

I set out a tong transfer of turtles (from various Toobs) with one to one correspondence to the turtle clipart (the turtle bingo from PreKinders).  This was something J-jo kept returning to do.

I used the boards from our Tag counting toy and added turtle erasers I found last year or the year before at the Dollar Tree.

J-jo did his MFW K sheets.  These are the same each week – cutting and sorting letter sounds and other prereading worksheets.  It isn’t much – four sheets for the week and we don’t do the copywork or the drawing.  He is now starting the reading section of the curriculum, which starts on week 6, the turtle week (I haven’t blogged about each week because I am behind in blogging).  He isn’t quite ready, but I “do” the lessons with him when he is willing and find it interesting when it seems he is reading a cvc word.  He is unlike Bear in that she likes to show off what she knows.  He likes to pretend he doesn’t know anything when in fact he kind of does.

(blurry, but I love this look of concentration)

We read a lot of books about sea turtles, and a couple about tortoises.  A hit was A Mama for Owen, which is more about a hippo, but the hippo’s new mama is a tortoise.  We read Turtle Splash again, which is a countdown book.

There’s a great movie about sea turtles on Netflix streaming that we watched.  It was impressive to follow a sea turtle from hatching to her return to lay eggs and I wish I knew how they had filmed that.

Bear did a narration of what she remembered about sea turtles from the readings and the movie.  It was a very good narration that she read as her presentation at Classical Conversations.  I still write her narrations for her.  I find the narrations are much more thorough if we do them this way.

Bear did a lesson from Artistic Pursuits Book 1 on drawing from photos, using a photograph of a tortoise.

We are moving on from “U is for Us” (and I probably won’t blog about that one because it was uninspired and uninspiring) to “D is for Dinosaurs.” Here’s what we did for dinosaurs almost two years ago.

One of the play things in our yard are the ten stumps I salvaged from the neighbors when they had their tall pines removed last year. 

 
I’ve only put out a bit of Fall material.  We’ve been spending hours outside enjoying Fall and picking and drying gorgeous leaves though. 

Using a number line to see relationships between numbers.  If you are at 10 and want to go to 7, how many jumps?  Or, if you are at 3 and want to go to 9? We will be spending more time doing work like this.  I need to make her little cards to go with it to make it an independent choice.

The stamp game comes out almost every day.  She’s done addition and subtraction, both static and dynamic, and I’ll soon be introducing multiplication.  I recently read that it is important to word the problems as a number taken X times.  For example 2×3 would be worded 2 taken 3 times, and not 2 times 3.  When you think of how the child takes the tiles from the compartments, that wording makes more sense.  I will be presenting multiplication with the golden beads first to make it more concrete, then returning to the stamp game.