October's End: Weeks 8 & 9

 

You guys, look how beautiful November is. I can't even stand it.

So! It's been a couple weeks since I posted, which is 100% my bad. I wrote a lot of this last week, but getting it online didn't happen like I wanted it to - largely because I spent so much energy rearranging the classroom I shorted myself out for a week. It was totally worth it, though, and on Tuesday you'll be able to see the exciting changes that have taken place since my last post.

"But Mia," you say with a healthy and completely understandable dose of skepticism, "You always say we'll be able to read things in a couple days and then you almost never come through. How do we know you won't just leave us hanging again?"

Because I've already written the post and have it waiting as a draft, that's how. Three cheers for being prepared!

Now, to business. We have had a crazy busy couple of weeks. There were presentations and parties and field trips and projects and packages and because of that, this post is going to be mega long; get ready for some quality entertainment.

Week 8: October 21 - October 25

 

On Tuesday we finished our globes. I am so pleased with how these turned out, there are not even words. The best part about these things is the addition of the little boats, which was a last minute (as in, within thirty seconds of the original final touches) decision agreed upon by me and the Agents as a necessity. The Agents love how they turned out too, and had fun singing our Columbus songs while making them. This was two weeks well spent.

Look how gorgeous those tiny ships are.

Just look at them.

 

On Wednesday the Agents and I took our first trip to the Dyer Library in Saco with the Little Treasures Preschool, and we are now making this excursion a permanent part of our schedule. This library is fantastic in that it is only a short walk away. It's always great being able to spend time with the preschoolers, because the Agents both have siblings and friends in the younger class.

 

 

 

On Thursday we had our first ever out-of-Saco fieldtrip to Pumpkin Land in Mechanic Falls. It was a beautiful-if-somewhat-chilly day, and we did so many things. Both Agents were drawn to a couple particular activities multiple times, and would probably have been content to do said activities forever if we would've let them.

Agent M's Pumpkin Land Activity of Choice: The Horse-Shaped Tire Swing

Agent V's Pumpkin Land Activity of Choice: The Ball Toss

Accompanying us on our field trip was Agent M.'s younger sister, Honorary-and-Future-Agent A.

 

 

Their mother also came along, and I'd like to say a huge thank you to Mrs. D for being our second sponsor and helping chaperone the Agents! What they lack in number they more than make up for in sheer energy and daring, as evidenced by their numerous balancing acts and trips down the Giant Slide of Doom.

 

 

On Friday, we delivered food collection bags for the Saco Faith Chapel. The church is collecting canned and non-perishable food items to distribute during the Thanksgiving and Christmas holidays, and the school was asked to help by leaving bags on porches for people to fill. The Agents had a lot of fun with this, because they felt like they were on a super secret mission while sneaking up to the porches and determining the optimal placement of a bag for maximum viewing convenience.

We also made smoothies during our delayed-from-two-weeks-ago Friday cooking session, as per Agent V's request.

 

The smoothies turned out alright, although they were probably the messiest and least photogenic thing we've made thus far. Every time I went to take a picture of the Agents drinking the smoothies, I had to pause the photoshoot to have a mini-lesson on how exactly one goes about drinking from a cup.

Something the Agents found highly entertaining.



Week 9: October 28 - November 1

Last week started off pretty normal. Monday and Tuesday were uneventful days, only busy in that we tried to get as much done as possible in preparation for the monsoon of fantastic things forecasted to begin on Wednesday and continue through the rest of the week - which it did, beginning in the form of a fire truck.
 

Awesome, or really awesome? You decide.

 

A fireman from the Saco Fire Department came and talked to the Agents and the kids from Little Treasures Child Care about fire safety, with a focus on where to go and where not to go in the event of a fire.




 He then took the kids out to see the truck, and I don't know who was more excited about this:  the kids exploring the truck, or the people taking pictures of the kids exploring the truck.













On Thursday the monsoon of fantastic things continued with a Harvest Party, which both the Agents and the kids from LTCC participated in. Most of the party was put together by Athena and the awesome teachers from LTCC, so I want to say a huge thank you for making all the fun happen!

There were two parts to our party: The Lunch and Movie, and The Costume Scavenger Hunt. Lunch was potluck picnic style, provided by the kids and their families and eaten in the FMLCS classroom. During lunch, we watched the movie It's the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown.

 

 

 

 

 

After the kids finished eating, the preschoolers left to take a nap and the Agents had their quiet time, we had a Costumed Scavenger Hunt put together by the preschool teachers Lindsey and Amanda. Bags of treats were hidden in various places around the schools, and the kids had to follow clues read aloud to find them while simultaneously looking adorable in their costumes.

 

 

Expert multi-taskers, these guys.



 

Friday was a hodgepodge of fantastic things. We opened a couple packages my grandmother sent to me (see my previous post to read about how my awesome family sends me awesome things), which included manipulatives and books and dolls and - the Agents' personal favorite - animal masks.

 

 

We began a unit on animals in Week 8, and have been learning the differences between vertebrates and invertebrates. This week our project was building different models of vertebrae out of pasta and gummy lifesavers, taking out different parts and seeing how that might affect an animal's movement and begging to eat the gummy lifesavers we just extracted from the models and whining when forced to put them back into place.

 

 

 

 

 

We finished out the day and our crazy fantastic week with bowls of spaghetti, as requested by Agent M.

 

 

 

 

 And that was how we ended out October! Come back on Tuesday - no really, come back on Tuesday - to read about our fancy new classroom and how it has improved our learning experience, and next Sunday (with any luck) to read about the cool things we got up to this week.

 

Thanks for reading and God bless,

Mia

 

 

(...and Spider Hippo)

 

 

 

 

Agent Spotlight: Agent M's Sight Word Worksheets

Here it is, at long last:  Agent M's Spotlight! I bet you thought this was never coming out, didn't you?

 

Oh ye of little faith.

 

Remember when I wrote that post about the Agents and their worksheets? Well, every time I put these worksheets in Agent M's sight word Workbox, she literally cheers: "Yes! My favorite thing!"

 

Don't be fooled by her 'couldn't care less' expression. She's really excited. On the inside.

These worksheets from the blog Confessions of a Homeschooler help Agent M. with her sight word recognition. Sight words - also known as high frequency words - are some of the most commonly used words in print, and children are encouraged to memorize them so they can automatically recognize them in print without needing decoding strategies. The worksheets have Agent M. writing each sight word multiple times, reading a sentence in which the sight word is used, writing the sentence out, then cutting up letters at the bottom of the page and gluing them into boxes to spell the sight word.

 

 

She does these at least twice a week, but if I let her she'd breeze through the whole collection in a day. The cutting and pasting bit is the best part, she says, but she also gets really excited when she does the punctuation at the end of the sentences. A well-formed question mark is cause for celebration.

 

Check back next week to read about Agent V and one of his favorite Workbox activities!

 

God bless,

Mia

 

 

 

 

Blue Hands and Classroom Christmases

 

What's this? A post on an actual Sunday? With more than ten minutes to spare?

 

Told you I'd get better.

 

This week was short thanks to Columbus day, but we still got a lot done! Spelling tests, end-of-unit math reviews, number chains, word chains, a bajillion worksheets (naturally) - all kinds of unphotogenic things. The most exciting thing we did this week was continuing to work on our globes, which the Agents found around twelve times more fun than paper mache. Namely because they could dance around with paintbrushes and paint their whole hands blue.

How did I not see this coming?

We also got two surprise packages from my Aunt Shelly in Minnesota! She sent us tons and tons of fantabulous (that's fantastic and fabulous, people) books, from picture books to leveled readers.

 

Not gonna lie, I went totally fangirl over the Disney picture book series. I mean seriously, the spines of the book make up a castle when you put them in order. It doesn't get cooler than that, people. Seriously.

I have the best family on the planet, always sending me and the Agents cool things. At the beginning of the year my grandparents sent a couple boxes full of awesometacular (awesome and spectacular - I don't make these things up) books and teaching materials, like the Math Turbo game and the Yellow Word Maker-Magig.

 

 

 

The Agents really like getting these packages. I let them help open and unpack the boxes, and they have a lot of fun discovering what's inside. It's like Classroom Christmas.

 

 

Thanks Grandma, Papa, and Aunt Shelly!

This week is going to be splendiferous (splendid and...um...odiferous? No? Splendiferous is actually a word? Huh. The more you know.), mostly because Thursday is our very first field trip. We're going to Pumpkin Land, which is a super cool place full of pumpkins and corn and laughter. We'll also be finishing up those globes and making the fruit smoothies we didn't get to last week, and on Tuesday you can read about Agent M. and her sight word worksheets. What's that, you say? A field trip and fruit smoothies and an Agent M.-centered blog post all in one week?

Like I said. Splendiferous.

God bless,

Mia

Agent Spotlight: Agent V's Number Chains

(...in my defense,  there's still one minute of Wednesday left.)

Once a week aside from the regular Sunday blog post, I'll try to spotlight an Agent and one of their favorite activities or work they're particularly proud of. Since Agent V was our first volunteer, this week we'll be taking a look at one of his favorite Workbox math activities:  number chains.

I got the idea from See a Word, Say a Word, which is a fantastic workbook that helps students with high frequency and number word recognition. It has a page with multi-color rectangles students are meant to cut out and string together according to a number printed on each rectangle. To avoid making a bajillion copies, I cut strips of colorful construction paper and write the numbers 1 through 10 on them with a Sharpie, and Agent V puts them together accordingly. He does one or two number chains a week, and we're trying to see if he can make enough to go all the way across the room.



I took this picture a couple weeks ago; so far he's got five sets of ten, with a grand total of fifty chain links.

 

This is a really simple but really great activity, because each helps Agent V with number recognition and sequencing, and it improves his motor skills as he maneuvers the paper to make a chain and keeps things together when taping the strip ends down. It also gives him something to work towards and keep track of; a couple sets of ten a week really starts to add up.

Check back next week to read about Agent M and her (inexplicably) favorite sight word worksheets!

God bless,
Mia

A Busy Two Weeks

 

When people told me last year how pretty the leaves get in the fall up here, I kinda shrugged it off - they didn't look any different from the fall leaves in Ohio. I believe those people now. Without the wind and rain of last fall, the leaves have had the chance to turn and are doing so with a bang. It's all I can do not to just stare up at them the whole of recess while the Agents take advantage of the final warm days of the year.

 

 

 

I'll be honest, I've dropped the ball with this regular blog posting thing. I forgot to write one the week before last, and this one is being published on a Monday rather than a Sunday. I'll get better, promise. The Agents say my days of the week are already improving. Although I didn't write anything, I did take a lot of pictures - which is good, because so much has happened since my last post! During the past two weeks, we...

...had week of prayer with Pastor J.E. Boone and Sylvia Gauthier.

 

...finished our unit on Picasso with these fantabulous abstract portraits.

 

...made family trees using handprints from our family members.

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...made breakfast cups (sort of - it was more like one big breakfast casserole, as I'd been wrong in thinking the church had a muffin tin and forgot to bring my own as backup).

 

 

...germinated seeds for our greenhouse.

"Okay, Agent M, smile! No, like an actual - just - Agent M, you can do this, see there it is no wait, hold it, c'mon, I know you know how to sm...fine."

...studied the germinated seeds.

...planted our greenhouse.

 

...learned the C chord on our ukuleles.

 

...and learned about Christopher Columbus and started our paper mache globes

 

This week we're finishing our globes, learning the G chord, taking our first spelling test, and making fruit smoothies. Come back Wednesday to read all about Agent V and his number chains!

 

Have a beautiful week and God bless,

Mia