Books, Birdhouses, and Kittens

Scott and Jyldyz gave Tornado a wooden birdhouse to paint for Christmas. He worked on it a few days ago, and it turned out great. He painted his name across the roof.

Today we walked around outside and looked for the perfect place to hang it. We found it indeed.

Since I haven't included many of our educational endeavors lately, here is a picture of our kitten books that I set out this week. I checked these books out from the library a couple of months ago, but I had to keep rechecking them because we never got around to the kitten part of our next section of the letter of the week curriculum. Tornado and I had been working on other skills in his workbooks and reading a lot. Also, taking weekend trips and celebrating the holiday caused our routine ("routine," hee, hee; I'm trying to sound like my other home school friends I admire so) to change up a bit.

Besides reading kitten books the past couple of days, we have worked on our The Owl and the Pussycat word-find and coloring pages. He added words to his Word Chart and completed a couple of pages in his Big A, Little A...What begins with A? book. (Word Chart: file folder with pages stapled in it - blanks under each letter to fill in appropriate words. Big A book: He loves Dr. Seuss's book ABC that goes like that. There was a print off on the Mailbox magazine website that could be used to make your own sentences. For example, today he did V: Big V, Little V, what begins with V? A vacuum eats a violin. V, V, V. And then he drew a picture of it.)

We also took quizzes with Book Adventure on some of the books we read today. We love this site; I may have mentioned it before. Kids read books, and there are quizzes (not for every book out there, but there are a lot) for them to take. He can read the questions and answers all on his own now. In the past few months, something has flipped the switch to his confidence in reading. It's not like he's reading chapter books by himself, but we are proud of what he is doing. They receive points for all their correct answers, then work toward prizes like posters or books. It's all free. He has earned almost 3,000 points so far. That kid remembers more details about the books than I do. Ryan was mentioning that tonight when they were doing a page out of his reading comprehension workbook that Scott and Jyldyz also got him. It's like how kids are always better at Memory, etc. than I am. And better than most adults, I think. Why is that?