Week of August 21st Learning Update

My mother recently had major 5 hour abdominal surgery, so during that time everything went on the back burner. Her surgery was much more successful than predicted and she is home after being in the hospital for  two weeks.  She still has a long recovery, but she is cancer free thank goodness!!!!

Also I have become a huge fan of Pinterest. Pinterest is an easy way to organize all of the information/ideas you find on the web.  I LOVE it! You need to request an invite, but it only takes a day or two to arrive.   If you would like to follow me please click the button below:




So we are back on track now.  Madison transitioned to a 2 hour gymnastics class at Best Gymnastics and had a great first class.  She is so excited and has a super fun time while learning.  She starts Preschool next week and is really looking forward to it.  She absolutely adores her teacher!  Her teacher is one of those people who are very special and make such a difference in kid's lives.  I couldn't ask for more!  She will now go 3 days a week!  Madison also started round 3 of swimming lessons.  She swam the length of a backyard pool last night by herself.  I need to make a point to get to the pool this weekend so she can go off of the diving board.  I've been preoccupied and didn't want to miss this first so we've been putting it off.  She also has expressed interest in soccer.  I am still debating if we should do it or not...it might be too much, but I guess we can always try it and drop it if it is.  I remember my older daughter playing soccer at age 4, it was just heard ball and picking flowers, but Madison is a totally different child so I guess I should give it a go.  She really like the soccer skills class she took last year.

Tomorrow should be very interesting since Madison has her 4 year well child check up.  AKA, lots of shots.  I am currently trying to convince daddy that he should take time off of work so that when she does get the shots she is looking at him and not me. ;)  He's only seen her get one shot and that was over 3 years ago, so I think its time again.  We'll see. 

This week we've been focusing on learning her numbers.  She can tell me all of the numbers from 1-10 and 20-100, but for some reason we are having major issues with the teens.  I am trying to be patient and just go over them 5 times a day.  I am waiting for it to 'click'.

I am still working on the 'at' and 'an' phonics family, because I don't want to push her too hard.  I want to make sure we have it down before moving on.  She still tried to 'guess' and says that 'can' is 'cat' instead of actually sounding them out, so until she has it down 100%, we are not moving on to the next set.

She can read the first 4 BOB books very well.  So we are going to move on to book 5.

I decided last weekend that it might be a good idea to get Madison an American Girl Doll.  She has several imaginary friends (yes I looked it up and its normal) and that is fine except when she wants to play with older kids, which is all the time.  I've noticed they've started looking at her funny (I would too).  So I thought, maybe if we got her a doll that was her new best friend she could talk to it and then it would look normal.  She loves her new doll that she named Natalie and so far we have left our imaginary friends at home.  :)

This week Madison started out by making a collage.  Except she doesn't really know what that means, so she drew a picture and glued some beans and jewels to it.  Open ended art work is a "learning in progress" for her. :)

Then we did a couple of more read it, trace it, paste it from the Ready2Read Unit 1.

Madison enjoyed creating her masterpiece.  First she painted half of a Styrofoam ball.  She chose orange.

Then she stuck pipe cleaners that she had molded into it.

And here's a picture of her final masterpiece:

Target has a bunch of learning school items in their dollar section and so I picked up some of these soft blocks.  Madison sorted them by color and then shape.  She counted the amount of different shapes, per color and then added the two together.

Madison enjoyed spending some time playing dress up

And completing workbook pages

We also focused on building with blocks.

I think we will all of a lot more energy once this heat wave breaks, but it doesn't look like there's an end in sight for that yet.  :)  I will also have the chance to become a lot more organized once she starts preschool again and I have some free time. :)