Been a long time

Time flies when you're...well..seems like time flies unless you are sitting in the waiting area at the doctor's.
We have been "back to school" for awhile now, I've just been too lazy to update!
We started a new math program last week. It's called Math U See. It's pretty neat. SweetPea has already been doing math: counting, patterns, tally marks, ordinal numbers, odds and evens, addition, and subtraction- but I was stuck on how to teach place value. Turns out it was much easier than I thought, but I was afraid if I taught it wrong it would be very difficult to unteach it. (My friend Carmen had loaned me the Math U See system back in July, but I really didn't think I'd need it.) I don't think SweetPea likes it as much because there's alot more work involved for her. I do think it has helped her to "see what the number looks like", as she has to build numbers with this system. The blocks are similar to Cuisenaire Rods (oh how I loved those back in my day), but instead of just smooth blocks, the Math U See blocks are scored to show the units. That is to say, the two-unit block has a notch that divides the block into two. The three block has two notches, so you can see that it is three units. Even the hundred block, which is a 10x10 square is marked so that you can actually see (and count) that there are 100 units that make up the block. Early in using the system, as we are, you learn to "build" the numbers that are in your book. Like the book will have the number 284. SweetPea will take out the four-unit block (or four one-unit blocks, eight ten-unit blocks, and two hundred-unit blocks, and places them on her paper. Then she reads the number out loud. She doesn't think she should have to keep building them now that she knows them, but part of the program is a continual review of what you have mastered, so build she must. It has been very neat to see how the program works.
We are also doing a Unit Study this time, which encompasses (almost) all subjects, which has the added bonus of taking less time. Not that I am in a hurry, mind you, but the flow is better this way. There's not the time of changing gears to move to something else. We are studying Penguins. We are covering science (Penguin life cycles, food web, etc), geography (where they live), reading (well, reading books about them), handwriting, and so on. We even have some Penguin stick puppets that SweetPea is using for puppet shows. Monkey had a few days off from ps this week and has been reading Mr Popper's Penguins with SweetPea. That has been very nice.