Saturday

Summary Saturday: Being Odd Gets You Even


Well, my Summary Saturday post is not going to reflect everything we did this week because my camera has no batteries.


Why does my camera have no batteries? Because my Preacher Man was panicking two nights ago because none of the Wii remotes would work, and of course there were no AA batteries in the closet.


Why was Preacher Man panicking because the Wii remote wouldn’t work? His nighttime ritual of watching Top Gear through Netflix was about to be derailed. I couldn’t stand his sad, pathetic face so I gave him the batteries out of my camera.


Therefore, most of these pictures are our school pictures that we took during the week before Friday night when my batteries went MIA, but I’ll try to share our fun stuff from Friday and Saturday sans pictures.


First up is Magpie’s preschool work. Here she is building the walls of Jericho out of Legos. I would tell her a shape and she had to make the “walls” into that shape. This was her pentagon:

After we built the walls, her and Monkey marched around them, then blew on their trumpets and knocked them down. They both thought this was great fun! Here they are blowing their trumpets:


This week Chipette and I worked on some truths in math about odd/even and addition. We were using her MEP lessons (quickly becoming our favorite math!) and the first section on the worksheet had her come up with all of the two number combinations to make 15. Then she had to color the odd number in the addends if there was one. There was always one number that was odd not matter which set she used. We talked about what happens when you even+even, odd+odd, even+odd, and odd+even. If the addends are both even or both odd, then you will get an even answer. If the addends are mixed even or odd, then you will get an odd answer.


The final problem on her worksheet asked her to use the numbers 1, 2, 3, 4, and 5. Divide the numbers so that their answers are the same number. Here is one of Chipette’s attempts:

Then we talked about, how you would never get the same answer because you would always have an odd/even combination in one group, even if you always had an odd/odd or even/even combination in the other. There was no way to work the problem!



This is why I love MEP. It gives kids problems that don’t have an answer to prove the math principle they just learned. Chipette was really excited to figure this out. I spent the rest of the day rattling off numbers and asking her if the answer would be odd or even. She got it right every time!


Next up was our “fun” activity for grammar. Chipette is becoming a regular grammar guru. I wrote six sentences on the marker board. Her job was to find the verbs in each sentence. Then we talked about what type of sentence each was. One of them was imperative, the rest were declarative. I told her to change one of the declarative sentences into an exclamatory and the other into an interrogative.


What made it challenging is I used sentences from The Witches by Roald Dahl, so these weren’t things like, “The dog ran.” Now find the verb. I wasn’t sure if she could handle the challenge, but all of our grammar reviewing has paid off. She rocked it!



She gave herself an A- because she forgot to underline the linking verb “was” in the third sentence. But I was very pleased with her attempt. These sentences were much longer than what we had been working with and more complicated.
Monkey just couldn’t stay away from us during school time this week, so he moved his Little People sets into the dining room and spent quite a while getting them all lined up just so.

This Friday night our family had the wonderful opportunity to participate in Friday Night Singing. Over fifteen area churches were invited to attend, some even as far away as seventy miles. We had a great turnout at our church, wonderful food afterward, met lots of new people, and caught up with some old friends. I have such found memories of doing things like this as a child and I know my kids really enjoyed it, even if Magpie did fall asleep on the pew!


Today we got to attend our new friends’, C and A, birthday party. C turned five and A turned one, so two very important birthdays! Here is a picture of C at Magpie’s recent party:



The kids had a wonderful time splashing in the pool and sliding down the inflatable water slide. A busy ending to our week, but well worth it!


Using plenty of verbs (singing, sliding, splashing, eating, learning) in the tree house,


Chelli






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