We are lucky enough to have a play bank center at our local Children’s Museum. It is a great place for cooperative role playing for groups of children. I love the oversize coins on the wall. Tornado Boy loves to play here. He loves being either a banker or a customer.

Tornado Boy waiting for his first customer.

Tornado Boy presents his savings passbook.

TB doles out money from the vault.

Trading bills with another banker.

It’s pretty easy to setup a play bank at home. We have a great play cash register from Learning Resources. It comes with bills, coins and a credit card that are great to use for playing bank and other money games. We are using the bills and coins to explore adding money and the concept of whether TB can “afford” to purchase something that he wants. It’s a good idea to alternate who gets to be the banker and who gets to be the customer so that the child can see the game from both perspectives.

Additional Resources:

• The Coin Counting Book is a good visual resource for adding coins.
• For more advanced money lessons, the U.S Mint has a nice selection of lesson plans that you can use to help teach your children more about money, too.
• The Mint.org has information on how banks work and more advanced topics like compounding interest.
• Neat Interactive look at the new $100 bill coming out early next year.

Check out what other kids are playing at Childhood 101 and to see what other kids are working on for math, check out Math Links at Joyful Learner.

©2012 One Little Room.... All Rights Reserved.

We were on the road for part of this week, so our “official” school time was pretty limited. We did a lot of “car schooling”. I posted earlier in the week about our wedding trip to DC, Canada and Detroit, Michigan. The photo to the left was taken in Maryland during our trip. This mosaic sculpture was outside the restaurant where we had breakfast. Tornado Boy saw it from the window where we were sitting and wanted to go investigate after we ate. Unfortunately there wasn’t any sort of plaque on it and I couldn’t find any further information on it. The tile work was really neat, though. We’ve done foam mosaics and we once participated in a group mosaic tile at our local gardens, but we’ve never done a full tile pattern. I think I’ll put that on the bucket list for this school year. I’ve seen craft kits for them at Michael’s before. I’ll have to put a note on my to do list to save one of their coupons for it.

Science:
We attended a drop-in science class this week that was really awesome. I’ll post more about it on Sunday, but this photo is Tornado Boy holding a balloon that we were able to pass a dowel through without popping it. They had so many cool experiments set up for the kids to try out.
We also got a neat impromptu lesson in animal camouflage when we saw this Katydid on our door. If he was on the right plant, he sure would blend right in. His wings have veining identical to a leaf. We’d still hear him though, they make a tremendous amount of noise. Between the Katydids and the frogs around here, it is loud with wildlife at night.

Reading:
We turned in our Summer Reading program sheet at our local library this past week. Tornado Boy is super excited because he now has a “Star Reader” sticker on his window of the car. Unfortunately we didn’t get to Barnes and Noble yet and Borders was out of most of their free promo books, so we’ll have to try again later to complete those programs. I’m glad that we had participated in What We’re Reading for several weeks because it made it really easy to log the books that we had read on the worksheets – all I had to do was look at my blog posts.

Math:
Tornado Boy is working on memorizing his addition and subtraction facts. He can do some in his head, some on his fingers and for some others it helps to use the Math-U-See blocks. I had him do this Toucan worksheet this morning to try to evaluate where he was. He seems to know all of the +0, +1, +2 and doubles facts for addition. The remaining facts he is typically using a manipulative to solve. He taught himself subtraction, so we haven’t learned them in “families” of facts.
I’ve sort of put Math-U-See on hold for the moment and we’re mostly working on writing fluency at the moment. He can write the numbers, but he will sometimes reverse seven and the rest still require a some thought to print. He got the answers correct on this worksheet, and then I scanned it into the computer and we used the computer to do the color by number part.

Playtime:
Tornado Boy had fun doing a puppet show for me in the new studio at our Children’s Museum. They have a great selection of puppets, but he was disappointed that there was not a curtain for the stage.

He also visited the art studio for a bit of painting time. In the first one he was just experimenting with mixing colors – green, blue and yellow. In the second, he asked for my help in making a rainbow. He picked the colors using the ROYGBIV mnemonic – except that as usual, there was no indigo paint.

If you’d like to see what else happened this week, check out the “Weekly Wrap-up” at Weird, Unsocialized Homeschoolers.

©2012 One Little Room.... All Rights Reserved.

Check out more Wordless Wednesday at Five Minutes for Mom.

©2012 One Little Room.... All Rights Reserved.

While running full-tilt through our living room, Tornado Boy was yelling “I’m going accelerando (faster and faster)!” I know that he picked this up from the Little Einsteins cartoon. I’m really enjoying hearing him playing around with the words that they teach about music, and applying them to situations in life. The other day we were on our way into camp and a little boy was yelling. Tornado Boy commented that he needed to be speaking diminuendo (decreasing in loudness). It’ll be nice to see if he retains the words if/when we ever get around to having him take music lessons.

Find out what other kids are saying, or link up and post your own story at Tiny Talk Tuesday at Not Before 7.

©2012 One Little Room.... All Rights Reserved.

I had in my (very loose) master plan for this year to start studying the individual states of our country. We’re currently participating in a postcard swap and we get one postcard a week. We’re working through the alphabet and we received the Maine postcard last week. I want to use them to start a scrapbook of sorts for our states study.

Fast forward to one seriously cool birthday gift and we’ve jump-started our state study this week. This Melissa and Doug License Plate Game is such a great learning tool AND you can’t drop any of the pieces, they stay attached to the board. The board has a map as the base, and then example license plates that rotate on top. When you see a car with the license plate, you flip that piece and that state and capital are listed on the reverse side. It is a brilliant car game. We were so excited to be able to add this to our travel kit.

We spent three days this week out looking for license plates around town. So far we’ve found 44 of 51 (the map includes Washington, DC) plates. I must admit, we have sort of stacked the deck by spending some of our time driving through hotel parking lots. Tornado Boy definitely likes to be successful and this helps keep him engaged in the game. The good news is that there is so much to learn playing this game, there is far more to it than meets the eye. Here are some of the things that we’ve talked about during the past couple of days:

• The names and pronounciation of the states and capital cities.
• That Washington DC is the capitol of our country, an independent city and not part of any state.
• Mapping/direction skills. I used north/south/east/west directions to help guide Tornado Boy with locating states on the map.
• How “counties” work as some states have them listed on their plates.
• What an “antique” is, since we saw an antique vehicle plate.
• That laws vary state by state – some states require two plates – front and rear, some only rear.
• About some professions since we saw special license plates for things like farm use and government vehicles.
• Inconsistencies in the English language – like the pronunciation of Kansas vs. Arkansas.
• What some of the named areas of the country are like the West Coast, East Coast, New England, etc.
• How a ferry boat works when we saw a license plate from Hawaii. I was shocked that we saw one!
• How different states have different populations, which makes us more likely to see some states plates even if the state is far away. We’re also less likely to see closer states with small populations.
• We talked about the fact that Hawaii and Alaska are not placed in their true geographic position to save room on the board.
• We saw a couple of Canadian plates and we talked about their provinces, and how they’re similar to our states.
• We talked about geographic boundaries like the Atlantic Ocean, the Pacific Ocean, and the Great Lakes.
• We talked about the state motto that some states have on their plates. My favorite is Washington, D.C’s – “Taxation Without Representation.”
• We talked about the fact that Alaska is a relatively ‘new’ state as shown on their 50th anniversary plate shown above.

How many toys can you say help you learn about language arts, math (probability), history, geography and government that a young child can really enjoy? Probably not too many. We had such a great time this week. I’m going to have to figure out a way to really celebrate when we find the rest of our missing states.

That was our major schooling this week. We still have a lot going on here with camp, Tornado Dad’s birthday and general summer activities. Tornado Boy and I were able to see a youth theater production of Willy Wonka that was a ton of fun. In true little boy fashion he told me that his favorite part was when Grandpa Joe burped the fizzy lifting drink. Such a boy!

If you’d like to see what else happened this week, check out the “Weekly Wrap-up” at Weird, Unsocialized Homeschoolers.

©2012 One Little Room.... All Rights Reserved.

Overheard this weekend:

Tornado Boy to Daddy: Let’s Play! You’ll be the tickler, and I’ll be the run awayer!

Find out what other kids are saying, or link up and post your own story at Tiny Talk Tuesday at Not Before 7.

©2012 One Little Room.... All Rights Reserved.

We recently found the game “Stardoku” on Gudli Games. It’s a computer-based kids version of the popular game Sudoku. It uses colored stars and either a 4X4 or 6X6 grid, depending on how difficult you want the game to be for the child. It got my wheels turning. I knew that I could easily use the concept to make a fun hands on game.

First, I created the following 4X4 and 6X6 grids – feel free to click on either to download it as a pdf file from 4shared:

Click the picture to download the size grid that you're interested in as a pdf file.

Edited to add: The following instructions are for the 4X4 game, for the more challenging 6X6, use six each of six different colored markers.

For our test game, I just printed the grid out in black and white. I later went back and printed it in color on cardstock and I am going to laminate it for durability.

Second, I selected four colors of 2X2 Lego Duplo bricks to use as the games pieces. You’ll need four pieces of each color to play. If you don’t have Duplos, any small marker in four colors can work. You could also print out the 4 copies of the numbers 1 through 4 if you want to make the game more like traditional Sudoku.

Rules of the game:
Each color may only be used once in each row or column, or four square group (each of the colored corners). Once the puzzle is complete, there should be no duplicates in each area.

Setup:
Place some of the colored blocks on the grid, at least 4 to get the child started building out the puzzle. There are some grids available on the internet that show template patterns. When you’re first introducing the child to the game, you may want to start by having only one color missing in each row so that they see how the patterns work. I started Tornado Boy with 4 blocks on the grid. He works the board independently now, usually recognizing pretty quickly if he has created a duplicate in a row. Here are a few pictures of his game play:

The board setup.

Placing the first couple of blocks.

Getting Closer!

Victory! Such a boy!

Tornado Boy really loves this game. I think I may try to move him up to the 6X6 grid this week, though it is a much bigger challenge depending on how many squares are filled in to begin with.

Check out what other kids are playing at Childhood 101 and to see what other kids are working on for math, check out Math Links at Joyful Learner.

©2012 One Little Room.... All Rights Reserved.

I sort of laughed when I saw that the Homeschool Village had “What About P.E.?” as their question of the week. Physical education is definitely not optional in our house because my boy needs to RUN. I picked him up from camp the other day and the first comment that I got was “Wow! He has a lot of energy!”. I gave that one a hearty laugh and said “Really? I hadn’t noticed that!”

When you have a very active child, you sometimes need to get creative with schooling. I need to make sure that he has the opportunity to get that energy out or things can rapidly go down hill. We try to incorporate movement into our lessons whenever we can. I posted about our “Math Mat” early this week. That’s a perfect example of how we use movement to learn. Here’s Tornado Boy learning more about addition:

We love to dance if we can’t get outside. One of our favorite songs to “shake it” to is Get The Sillies Out from Yo Gabba Gabba.

Another indoor option for us is the Wii. We like the “Outdoor Challenge” game. The mat that comes with the game is split so that two people can play at the same time. Tornado Boy and I love to battle each other in the game where you sprint and jump over logs. We can also play cooperatively in some games. He is a worthy opponent and it always makes us laugh. This game has been helpful in teaching him sportsmanship. This game and the Wii Sports Resort are also good for showing that practice really helps to improve your game.

Tornado Boy has done some organized sport classes in soccer and gymnastics. He’s going to give t-ball a try in the fall. He’s not really a natural athlete, but we think it’s important for him to learn about team dynamics and to have some fun while being active. We’ve been long time members at our local kid’s gym. I’m very sad that he’s going to age out of their classes soon. Not only have we enjoyed them, but their “open gym” time has been a great option for us when the weather isn’t the best for being outside – like during the oppressive heat this summer.

For us, P.E. is a requirement of every day life.

©2012 One Little Room.... All Rights Reserved.

Here’s the map of how they’re organized:

What Lego storage system works for you?

©2012 One Little Room.... All Rights Reserved.

Our week in pictures:
Spelling:

Playing with homophones

Spelling - before FIN became FUN!

Science:

Touching Horseshoe and Spider Crabs

We observed a praying mantis on our house.

Tornado Boy predicted a hurricane would hit Colorado

Physical:

He built a pyramid - then took a rest

Practical:

He worked on cutting and taping

Playtime:

He built several big Lego buildings with Tornado Dad

Legos have really given me hope. Tornado Boy and Dad are playing with them nearly every night for very long periods of time. They made a tower that was nearly 5 feet tall the other night. Tornado Boy was on a ladder to put on the finishing touches. I’m really thrilled that he’s found something that he will pay attention to for long periods of time. He’s growing up!

To see what other families are up to this week – hop on over to Homeschool Creations.

©2012 One Little Room.... All Rights Reserved.