We had a very exciting wake up call this morning!  Men came up our road about 7:00 to repave our road so the boys got to watch the whole process before school started.

Austin helped Gavin pick out his short vowel sounds.

Gavin reviewed his cursive letters.

He doesn't slant his writing but he is writing neatly.

Austin did an A for Alligator craft today.  We started with a big, green 'A' and Austin added triangle teeth and eyes.

He really liked his alligator!

He practiced his pouring again today.

Gavin reviewed parallel lines and how to fold different shapes into equal parts.

Austin did a vehicles puzzle.

Then Gavin reviewed his place values.  He zipped right through this today so I think he's got it.  He's also recognizing 7-ten 6 as 76, etc.

After we read our moon books we practiced walking on the moon.  Not really, but we strapped big car washing sponges to Gavin's feet with rubber bands and he walked around.  I'm not sure this is really what it feels like to walk on the moon but it was all around entertaining!

Gavin had art today.  We studied the painting "Blue Dancers" by Edgar Degas and talked about how Degas experimented with photography and sometimes painters paint photographs.  So we looked through our Birds and Blooms magazine (a wonderful magazine if you haven't heard of it...it has fabulous pictures!) and Gavin picked out a picture of a little dog standing in lupine.  I thought it was going to be really hard for him but let him paint it anyway.  It was a good thing I did because it turned out great!

Here's Degas' painting:

And here is Gavin working on his painting.  He used watercolor crayons again. He is getting the hang of watercolor crayons.  You use them like regular crayons but then paint them with water to blend colors and make it look like watercolors.

I think it looks like a dog!

Austin and I read Little Apple Goat.

We read this book about alligators (not really about alligators but it has alligators in it).

Gavin and I read about Jacob and Esau.

Gavin and I read these books:

This book doesn't really have anything to do about the moon, but it's a cute book about a kitten who can't sleep because of all the noise in the barn and the mother cat tells the baby about all the animals that are up at night.

This morning Austin wanted to play with Play-Doh so we made a big and baby 'A' before he started playing.

Gavin read his blends and some 3-letter words.

Then he picked out beginning sounds and vowel sounds on a page in his workbook.

Austin LOVED the pouring activity I set up for him.  I put some rice in a measuring cup with a handle and put a funnel inside an empty (and clean!) applesauce jar.  He poured the rice from the measuring cup into the funnel, watched the rice go down the funnel, then poured it back into the measuring cup.  We lost a little rice but nothing the broom couldn't handle!

He also really enjoyed this activity for working on fine motor control.  He used tweezers to pick up pom poms and placed them into a star shaped ice cube tray.  He did a great job picking up the pom poms but he had some trouble getting the out of the tweezers and into the tray so sometimes he used his hands.

Then he played this balancing game.  He wasn't too worried about it being balanced though.

Gavin worked on his cursive 'h' today.  In math we reviewed place value: 3-ten 2, etc. on the abacus and with place value cards.  We also did simple addition on the abacus and talked about equal, bigger and smaller.

While Gavin did his math Austin played this color matching game.  He had no problem matching the colors but he did have trouble getting the matching pieces together.

Then he went matching crazying doing both his penguin matching games and his space matching game.

For some reason our printer is not working right now so I made my own 'A is for Ant' worksheet for Austin to do while Gavin worked on his Viking lapbook.

And, Gavin finally finished his Monet painting today, adding the waterlilies!  Next week we will start Van Gogh.

We read this book today.

These are the toys Austin was playing with today.