If We Lived Our Life As Society Expects Wouldn’t Life Be Boring?

We are basically back to normal here in the Reinsch-Johnson home… well as normal as we get! We are right back into the little organized schooling we do do in the summer – mainly math and sight word work… oh and our illustrations with a couple sentence description for the Summer Folder. It feels good to sit down with the twins at the table and work one on one once again. Zander is finally starting to really grasp some of the more complex (at least more complex than addition and subtraction) mathematical concepts… and Gavin is going hard on his sight word books.

Working together all 3 of us, Zander on math, Gavin sight words and yours truly checking on the new educational website

I have drug out my book What Your 1st Grader Needs to Know to sift through and see how far we have gotten. I need to source out a copy for the 2nd grader level but I do like to have this as a basic (very basic) reference to give me some guidelines as I go along. So far my goals for early in the year are to cover fractions in detail… focus on the months of the year (we have the days pretty well covered) and of course time. Beyond that I want to get the boys through VBS, the wedding, Echo’s birthday party and Nana and Baba visit before we go absolutely gungho on the studying. August is going to be a whirlwind month for this family!

Ken was not able to pick up some of the items we need in the city due to long lines at the dump and a need to take time out half way through the day to do some necessary online work (have to love the ability to take his work with him as long as he can find an internet connection). So we still do NOT have the grade 2 level math books… Gavin is not impressed, though he has yet to complete the grade 1 book. He loves to have things lined up in front of him. I absolutely love the books we bought for the year – they are Canadian based and cover pretty much everything in a way that the boys find very accessible. It is the Complete MathSmart and we were able to purchase them for under 20.00 a piece!

Love this one, Gavin is ALMOST done the whole thing...

I don’t know if I have mentioned it but Emanuel has made up his own little activity to accomplish using a piece of green construction paper, a crayon and the ABC magnets. He likes to sit down, sing the alphabet song until he gets to the letter he needs to write, he then finds the appropriate magnet and sets it down to copy it. He made it to G before I knew he was even doing it as he had chosen to do it at the blue table while I was working with the twins at the kitchen table. He is a very independent learner unlike his brothers who prefer hands on one on one time. It amazes me how different our boys (and girls) really are. 

Emanuel and his ABC page... so proud of his initiative!

I was contacted today by someone connected to a free educational resource site who had come across this blog. So of course I had to run and check it out! I am very glad I did. As always I suggest a membership to EnchantedLearning BUT here is another resource to check out for people who like to have printables… the site is called Education.com. Here is the actual worksheet link. I will be adding the link to the main site to my links on the blog! 

We had the neighbour boy come over today – unannounced as per usual… and of course arguments, rule breaking, etc ensued. I let it go as long as I could but when he went home and brought back a tennis ball and nerf bat and proceeded to hit the ball OUT of the yard and onto the house I stepped in. And when they wouldn’t STOP playing baseball in our little yard with arguing I called time. I am sure he is a nice boy but for some reason when he is here… it just doesn’t work. Then add to that Emanuel and Gavin having a run in on the way in the door ending with Gavin hurting his knee and I was mentally planning supper and maybe a summer movie before bed. 

A moment of calm at least... note the little chair Trinity is sitting on - Grandma brought it when she came to get Jimmie!

I am determined to have a crafty night… bows, stocking, tutu dress… maybe some scrapbooking. Wedding, Birthday and Christmas all in one night! With some random special event thrown in by the scrapbooking. For some reason that makes me VERY happy! And after the LAN party (LOCAL AREA NETWORK in case people were wondering… I had it pointed out to me that I had never explained that!!) I will make sure my crafting area is photo ready so I can take a picture and show everyone!

Just a bit of black there

I have a new decoration idea for the kids’ room I will share with everyone tomorrow… the twins just have something they have to do first before we can finish up. I still haven’t found the box of photos to go on the walls BUT an idea has been born to help the twins feel like their room is more decorated! 

The boys working on Emanuel's decoration

I really hope I can get some more crafty ideas going… I think I want to make Trinity a wand for Christmas… she is REALLY into them.. I just need to figure out what to make the stick part out of… my dowels here in the house are too short really!

Our resident butterfly and her half dressed sister (you can't see it but the little shorts say CRABBY)

Bitty baby

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