Short Bead Chains + 3 Boys in the School Room!

My first experience presenting the short bead chains was such a let down!  I was going to title this post "I Have the Whiniest Kid Ever."  Link was so excited when I said "Today you get to use your new bead chains!" We got through counting to about 8, and he said "Mommy, don't you know I don't like school?"  After taking turns with him a few times, I couldn't take the whining anymore and I finally just asked if he'd like to put it away.  He wanted to know if that meant school was over, but I told him he'd have to choose something or I could choose for him.  He chose the binomial cube, knob less cylinders, then he read me a few of his readers from LoE set A (he's on B now).  The rest of the day was a struggle.  Bumblebee was very interested in the 100 chain!

Baby in the school room!

Later, he mentioned again that he thought the bead chains were going to be fun, but they weren't.  After explaining that he would learn to skip count using them, he was interested again (he often tries to skip count, but can't.)

The next day, I let Link choose any color he wanted.  He asked for the long chains a few times, but I insisted that he had to show me could do the short ones first.  He was going to do them all!  He chose 1s, 2s, 3, and 5s.

I caught Bumblebee, who is about to turn four, taking short chains off of the cabinet several times.  At first I'd tell him no.  Then, when I realized that he was taking each off very carefully and folding it up to compare to the square, I decided to let him.  Then he said he wanted to skip count, but sometimes he'd skip numbers.  I decided to start him with the teen bead stair since he knows those pretty well, but still needs some work.  I'll work through the Group 3 section with him even though he hasn't started Group 2.  We finished up Group 1from Meg's album last week with the Memory Game of Numbers.  I need to check back with Gettman to see if there is anything that we skipped with Bumblebee.  He really gets the short end of the stick!  I need to start focusing more on where he is in the periods!  I'm not sure he's ready for Group 2, but I may at least introduce it.

You may also notice that there is an almost-two-year-old in the school room!  Boy does that make it difficult to stay in one place!  Beya has his shelves and really enjoys what is on them.  But he also likes to constantly see if he can grab something off of the other shelves.  He's only been joining us for the past week or so, so hopefully he'll learn soon and calm down a bit.  I have a feeling I'm going to have to start rotating his shelves now too!

This is all getting a little difficult for me to keep track of!  Bumblebee has learned all of his letter sounds and some counting, just from being around Link.  I haven't really focused on him at all!  I haven't even made sound boxes for him!  Don't ask me how he learned what he has, I'm amazed :)

Planning With Building Foundations of Scientific Understanding (BFSU)

I'm in the process of planning for our next term and I want to make sure I get a bit more Science in the mix.  To that end, I'm planning out a lesson from BFSU once a week, and hopefully integrating it with my nature study plans.

So I sat down with my BFSU and opened up to the flow chart page.  After flipping back and forth from it to various lessons, I decided to search online to see if someone had made something a bit more concise for planning.  It took me a while, but I found two great resources and I had to post the two links before I lost them!

First, is a list of the topics in an order that ensure prerequisites have been met.  The author of the book is very adamant about NOT creating this list from what I've read on different forums, because he wants to keep flexibility in how they are presented.  That's nice, but I'd rather have a schedule I can change than one that is so flexible that I can't follow it!  Here's the link to the blog where I found it.  At least now I can assign a lesson to a week and easily know what to prepare for ahead of time.

Second, is "Lesson Plans" for each lesson.  The order is very similar to the list of topics above, but different since there are various ways to meet the prerequisites.  These lesson plans cannot replace the book, but offer a concise plan to follow after the book has been read.  It'll make actually doing the lesson a little easier I think.  If you want to download this, I suggest using the Google Docs link, rather than clicking on the picture, as it is much simpler to get the file.