Tuesday, August 10, 2004

Quick Blog!

The day started with a very flooded cellar - mid calf on my 6' hubby! Lots of floating boxes - plastic and cardboard (even the one full of kids shoes). Even the shelving was floating!! The back yard was a couple of inches deep and the drains were not draining! Quite a bit of my stuff in the cellar got drowned - including some old letters from friends that I kept & some old wildlife magazines that could have come in useful :( Just hoping for some sun now to dry things out a little. Once that drama was over (had to plonk the kids in front of a video while we cleaned up a little to keep them from driving me nuts with lots of questions, like "is the house going to flood?") we got down to the stuff of the day!

More Zoo doings today, although drawing a zoo map was quite difficult. We did it as a team and it's not finished yet. The notebook idea went down well - now to get them to put something in them!! I think tommorrow we might do some of the worksheets - maybe - but they do seem more 'worky' than I really want at this point in time. That said though I think Jacob is actually hungry to get his teeth into a bit of work already.

Pics;
Animal Notebooks


Learning zone - day 2!


If you can see this it's a map of our imaginary zoo


Joel giraffe in the 'africa enclosure'!



I thought some of you might like to see this too! These are all the 'sight' words Joel has learned this year - and he's not allowed to stick on fresh leaves until the word is REALLY learned without trying to sound it out - because it can't be!

Joel's 'Tricky Word' tree in (almost) full bloom

6 comments:

Jax Blunt said...

Eek, sorry to hear about the cellar, but I suppose rather the cellar than the house...did you get any sun to finish up the day?

Jan said...

AArrgghh! about your cellar. Hope you didn't lose anything too important

Caroline said...

nothing to vital lost. And yes, we had a little sun this arvo - but I was too busy to enjoy it really.

Thanks for the link too Alison - some real goodies there!

Jax Blunt said...

Love the word tree...wonder if that would work with my reluctant reader...

Caroline said...

Hi Jax, yup I bet it would. It really helped Joel realise that not all words can be phonetically sounded out and that some of them you just had to learn on 'sight'. Once he started to be able to remember these words other words began to become more automatic too and now he only really sounds out words that are new to him. Previously he would sound out even the words he knew because he thought he had to - if you get me? This of course made readig slow and arduos (?sp). Now he is becoming more fluent he is also becoming less reluctant to 'have a go' and the more he reads new words the more confident he becomes. It's great to see :) Would you like me to send you my Word file for making it - save yourself the hard work? If so email me (pcjjap@wellyboots.fsnet.co.uk)

Caroline said...
This comment has been removed by a blog administrator.