starchamberexpereience: Wednesday, September 23 2009

Frazer has mastered the month of September in terms of the calendar. I am curious to how he will do when we switch to October.

This morning we went to BAPP to support the kids as they prepared snack. Frazer took his sketch pad with the idea that he would sketch one of the photos from the album Miles had given him. He thought it would be nice to give Miles a sketch as a thank you. He took his sketch pad and ended up drawing the praying mantis in the enclosed netting.

His sketch was much clearer and a better depiction when he used his pencils. Going back and adding marker seemed to detract from the work. I think maybe ai should invest in some more flair tips so that he can have the smooth effect of the marker without the broad and uneven strokes of the markers.

I think he added cardinals but they also look like the chicks from the photo book Miles had given him. We studied cardinals as state bird of VA as well as the photo album. Frazer did not say what they were except birds.

Next Frazer wrote Finn a letter. I did not photograph it unfortunately. He wrote, "Dear Finn, How is your new school going? Peace out dude! Your friend Frazer." he also decorated the front of the card with a pumpkin/jack'o'lantern. It was sweet and I had him fill out the return address as I knew we would visit our map work after this. My favorite part was Porter sitting down and drawing a square pumpkin for Matthew and even getting some of the word Matthew copied correctly.

After this fun experience, we settled into another section of Mission Addition which showed how to add numbers vertically as well as horizontal. He liked that enough that he asked to read the next section which discussed adding numbers when there are more than single digits. As Frazer does not yet grasp that any number plus ten is say thirteen or that number plus ten I felt like he would not get this concept but it good to expose him. Well, he seemed to do okay when I drew a grid.

Note the slash marks he is using even though he can count to 100 by 5's. Something about 10 + 5 is not clicking with him yet.

Copy of the book.

The slash marks help.

Vertical addition with double digit numbers. Hmm..

Okay he did this one easily. Little surprised.

This one he needed me to mark 10's and 1's column which I am not even sure he understands.

Next I wanted to return to the map work and try to show Frazer how he had mislabeled the map and encourage him to ask about the relationships if he does not understand.. I want Frazer to be able to articulate when he cannot easily discern a relationship or correlation. With the map, I don't think he knew to look at the houses number of the house he drew but he knew he needed a house number so he just ran up our street. In talking about it, we just discussed how when you look at your room, you can add lots of details and we you start moving out, you have less small details. He liked that and then mentioned the google map.

The big map of Richmond I had was not in the map folder -- hope we can find it. So we moved onto the study of the state of Virginia. Basic stuff - abbreviation, flag, bird.