A tiny ray of hope!

Those of you who have been following my blog (and my facebook ramblings!) will know that having a 15-month old around while I am trying to present to Addie has been quite a challenge! Bear wants to be involved in everything, touch everything, do everything that Addie is doing. She can be really in to doing something (rarely on her own, but there are moments of individual work), and he will just come in like a tornado and leave devastation in his wake... !

Some times, Daddy will take Bear to work with him, so we can really get in to some work, but he can't do that every day, and the struggles I have been having have really made me question whether or not I can do this home education thing...

However, today there was a tiny ray of hope.

I sat down with Addie to present Open Ended Distance Matching with the Knobbed Cylinders, which she absolutely loved, and along comes Bear... And he absolutely loved it too! Neither of them did the activity 100% as it is written in the album, but there was so much sensorial learning going on! Actually, Bear really surprised me once again with these. Although it is really a work for a 3-year old, he is really good at matching the cylinders to their holes (except the one where it is only the height of the cylinders that changes). He puts them back with no hesitation and very little error. And actually, it was not a disruption this time, it was great to see them working together. OK, so Bear did not get the cylinder that was requested, he went and got another one (and placed it, first time in the correct hole regardless of which cylinder it was), but Addie was really good at selecting the correct cylinders too, and we went through all of the cylinders, doing both the Open-Ended and Closed-Ended presentations because they loved this game! I was pleasantly surprised and the tiniest ray of hope started to come through... I managed to capture some of this on camera, but I have realised as I added the photos that I actually don't have any of the main work they did, just that difficult 4th block and also the last block we did when we started to lose interest...!

Bear is really good at realising when he has made a mistake - he recognised that the cylinder he did put in was in the wrong hole, and corrected himself - something I have only noticed from looking at these pictures as I write this post!

Addie did some more work on her lifecycles today... Here she is getting her Insect Lore Life Cycle Stages Frog to kiss 'his picture' on the Tadpole to Frog (Lifecycles) book (I wasn't going to correct her that the frog is a lady frog!)... 

And then Bear and I did some more work together - Rolling a Work Mat and putting it away! So cute! (and after that we got it out again and looked at the Children Around the World pictures together!)

Today was a good day. Tomorrow will be different. Actually we are going to watch the solar eclipse, hopefully at the beach! Onwards and upwards with a tiny ray of hope...

Pink Tower - not quite there yet!

Addie loves the Pink Tower, and we have done the basic presentation and the aligned one. When I am presenting, she is very good at telling me which cube goes next. When she practises however...

Our most productive day yet!

In our new classroom, we spent 2.5 hours this morning (just under our planned goal of 3 hours a day). Wow! So much work was done, and a large variety of things, more than with our old way of doing things.

A cool extension I made loosely based on the geometric cards that go with the geometric cabinet!

Looking out the window for the horses, Addie says "Where neigh gone?"

Getting ready for school: Making sound shakers

For our family night activity, we made some great sound shakers together for Addie's sensorial room. Here are some photos where we are making the materials. This is Addie putting chickpeas in a bottle. We also have salt, lentils and couscous, and I will add stones and paperclips when I get some. We just bought a value pack of diet lemonade bottles from Asda, emptied, rinsed and dried them and filled them up. Actually for the salt, lentils and couscous we used a funnel - the first introduction to it!

And then it is time to play!

She really enjoyed it and I am looking forward to making the visual ones next!

First day back in to the swing of things

Today Addie showed a lot of interest in her educational toys we have for her. She seems to have lost interest in most other toys to be honest, which is not a bad thing I suppose. There was one puzzle - a geometric shape puzzle, that she could not do before we left for our holidays and the Pageant. Today, she just picked it up and could do it! Daddy also showed her how to carry it properly, and she absolutely loves doing that too! Here is a video of her doing her work today! It also shows her new skill of being able to stand up independently (she was very resourceful before and always used something else to pull herself up) and also her ability to now walk confidently (she could walk before, but didn't seem to have the confidence to go for it and now she won't stop!)... She still needs a little help standing up and then picking something up, which is why I take the material off her while she stands up, but she is coming on in leaps and bounds! Go Addie!!