Decapitated Chickens

We've been running around like crazy people lately. I'm not really sure why. I feel like there is somewhere we have to be every day. We have not been sticking to our schedule at all. So, needless to say, I have a preschool unit, sitting about 3/4 planned out that I haven't had time to finish or implement. We're working on it though. But all things preschool have not gone out the window. I just don't have any really cute lesson plans to share. Lincoln and I have been working on sounding out 3 and 4 letter words, and also adding to a sum of 10.

For reading we've been going back and forth between the 1st Stage Bob Books and some flash cards that I made. I'm not a huge fan of flash cards, but Lincoln memorizes stories too quickly and I noticed that he was starting to have the Bob Books memorized. I switched to Hop on Pop by Dr. Seuss, but he has that one memorized too. I wanted to see if he really could sound out all the words I thought he could, or if he was just using an excellent memory for stories to fake it, so I printed up these flash cards of every three letter word you can sound out phonetically that I could think of. It's a long list. And, just for the record, he can sound them all out. Not all in one sitting, his stamina for it isn't that long yet. We just go through the stack until he says he's tired, then we stop. But we've gone through all of them several times and he can do them all. He still gets little b and little d mixed up quite a bit, but I have a fun lesson (again half way put together) planned to help with that, if I can ever get to it. Lincoln likes when we do the Bob Books better, even though they are harder because he has to put a thought together, not just a few sounds of one word. But he likes the pictures. He thinks they're funny, and always likes to add more onto the story than what's there. I think he's going to have to get the second set for Christmas.

For math we started out with me writing a couple problems on a white board, but since we were only doing sums to 10, I felt like I kept using the same problem over and over again. So I went and found some free online worksheets, because I figured they'd use all the different combinations you can put together to make 10 and use each combination equally. I take about 3 problems at a time and write them on the white board for Linc. Some days I give him a bag filled with those rocks you put in flower vases, and he looks at the problem and says, ok the first number is three, and he pulls out three rocks and put them under the number three, then he'll say, three plus two, pulls out two more rocks and puts them under the two. Three plus two equals...1,2,3,4,5(as he counts the rocks) 5! Other times, I have him do basically the same thing, except with the abacus. For some reason the abacus way goes MUCH faster. Either way, I like him to use manipulatives so that he can "see" the math he's doing. I want him to really understand that the numbers he's working with have a value. That 3 actually means, 1,2,3 things. We generally do about five problems a day, unless Lincoln asks for more at the end. He does about half the time. He must be his dad's child :)

We've also been trying to do some fun Halloween stuff. The other day we made finger puppets (I used the patterns off of kaboose.com) and I had the boys make up stories with them. It was funny some of the things they came up with. Here's a sampling: