Clown of God

Tuesday's schoolin' is complete. Today we read Clown of God by Tomie DePaola. It was kinda said, SweetPea agrees with me. After we read it, we found Italy on the globe, and I pointed out where Sorrento would be. We talked about the flag of Italy, and SweetPea colored one to put in a lapbook. (This week we will work on the lapbook a little each day, instead of trying to get it all done in one day!) We learned that in Italy, people speak Italian. Some Italian words were in our story. We are making a vocabulary pocket with them. (Like Grazie, Senor, Maestro, etc). I found a video of the book on youtube that we watched. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vma6fSqJgi0
Since Giovanni was a juggler, we talked about juggling and whether or not SweetPea thought kids could juggle. She waivered back and forth in her response, so I showed her this video, which she is sure Daddy will like too. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AokAYkSz4_o

In reading today we covered CVC and CVCV with E at the end. SweetPea practiced marking vowels as short or long. SweetPea read from Sun Up which is a reader that I used when I was in Kindergarten. I had searched for it for a long time on eBay and finally someone had the set for sale. This first reader in the set is actually a bit below SweetPea's reading ability, but I guess it worked as a confidence booster for her, and I sure enjoyed hearing the book again. It will not win any "Great Literature" awards, but it is cute, and good practice for early readers.

For math we talked about groups. We talked about how to make groups of equal amounts, then we practiced skip counting with these groups. We practiced skip counting by 10s, 5s and 3s.
We found a good stopping point, and SweetPea finally got to paint. She really enjoyed that.