School, school, school

Today is the first day of school for Todd...we sent him off this morning on his bike in the rain...what a trooper! Not sure what time we'll see him tonight again - I hope that his lab doesn't keep him the entire three hours on the first day, but you never know. This is engineering school!

The boys and I have had a good day of school here at home as well. Andrew did some math before JL woke up and we read about sporting events around the world. There was even a picture of a man shooting an apple off a boy's head which goes along with The Apple and the Arrow that we are reading about William Tell. The picture in the Usborne Children's Encyclopedia was a way different depiction then what our book says about the type of bow that was used.

We ventured into painting today with one of those thoughts - why didn't I just let a school deal with this just because of the mess, but in the end it wasn't bad. Washable paint is a very good thing. The activity was to paint with string. We had quite a few different types of strings, but in the end our hands ended up being a lot more fun!

They do have fun with painting so I need to let them do it a little more often. It was really funny that JL said that we had to wear aprons, even me because that is what they did at Ms. Russell's school. Aprons ended up being old shirts from the rag pile.

One of our other activities for the day was making letters in rice. In an attempt to get some handwriting in without actually having to use a writing utensil and paper (which Andrew seems to avoid), we started making letters in rice to learn to make them properly with a finger. Making letters properly means starting at the top and making them proportional. As long as they get time to play in the rice, they are willing to do it - at least so far. The handwriting manual tries to put some fun things in there too. We have a song that reminds us to put our letters at the top and the first letters that we are reviewing are called "Frog letters" because you jump back to the top of where you started after you make the original line. If you look closely in Andrew's you can see an M.