school with elle: day31.

her commentary: the sun got a haircut.



book 8 of the BOB books.



transcribed entry:
"It's a big rainstorm and thunder's coming. It's nighttime and the kids can't sleep. The moms and dads came into the kids' room. Then they could all fall asleep happily ever after, the end."

school with elle: day27

i've found that elle sometimes forms her letters in a haphazard fashion, adding on bits here and there till the resulting figure meets her satisfaction. we did a few more pages of her handwriting book to make letter formation a bit more expeditious.

[it boggles my mind, but she loves this exercise.]

school with elle: day26

one of our activities on this day involved constructing a cardboard guitar:



...so that elle could rock it out.

school with elle: day25

school with elle: day23

one of the day's activities was baking banana muffins. usually we mix the chocolate chips into the batter, but on this day we divided them evenly over the tops, counting out how many should go on each muffin to give them all an even amount of chips. a very tasty lesson in early division concepts.

school with elle: day 17.

part of our chalkboard activities each day includes recording the weather. i love elle's rendition of a windy day:



today we played an outdoor game where elle matched number words (one through ten) with their numerals. she used a combination of letter-sound correspondence and the process of elimination (plus a bit of guessing) to decode each word. [i helped her with the word one and reminded her that th makes the stick-your-tongue-out-sound, but the rest of the decoding was hers.]



this is a perfect example of how something that would bore her to snores on paper is Tons of Fun outdoors (notably when the writing utensil is sidewalk chalk).



we read a few books and poems with illos too pretty not to photograph:



three cheers for school!

school with elle:day16.

[disclosure: okay, so i'm having trouble keeping up with this here blog. (i antedate the entries to match the school day i'm transcribing, so you can't necessarily tell how far behind i am posting. but trust me, i am WAY behind.)

in an effort to keep this place afloat, i'll stick to highlights of our schooling, and i might skip some of our days altogether when life is a particularly special brand of crazy.]


following our garden field trip, elle and i did the normal calendar/chalkboard routine and then made a book of her favorite parts of the trip.



she drew ink sketches (below is the turtle crafted from rocks) and filled in the outlines with watercolors.





when the pages dried, i bound them together with a single line of stitching on my sewing machine to finish the book. the best thing about these books is that elle can then revisit each trip and activity whenever she wishes.