points are rolling in....

Lili has been using the website http://www.bookadventure.com for some of her reading work. I talked about it our first week back in January. She has been saving up her points and finally reached 1500 to cash them in for the dice game she wanted. Now she is patiently waiting for it to come in the mail. Now she is down to a little over 100 points and will be working on earning more. The problem is she has looked over the prize page on the site and there isn't anything else she wants. I like using the site and I have seen improvement in her reading comprehension. She is retaining more of what she reads now and will even refer back to a book a few weeks later. Luckily this site has a great plan just for my problem. A parent or teacher can sign in and create prize certificates for any prize they want to provide. Then when the child earns the prize the parent or teacher provides it. Could be a physical prize or an outing of some sort, endless possibilities now. I made up several certificates for her to work towards such as...ice cream sundae, puzzle, stickers, toy, lunch date, music cd and the BIG prize is a sleepover at Grammy's house. She has been asking to do this for a while. I wonder what she will decide to save up for first. They are all worth different point amounts. Will she go for what she can earn the quickest, a low point prize or save up for the big prizes? We shall see.

In addition to all the reading and point earning we have also been....

• spelling and math assessments. We are finished with them for a while now. Lili did really well on them and I don't like the constant "test" atmosphere and she got tired of it too. So periodically I will do a few assessments on the previously taught subjects and see how she is doing but not so often.
  
• practicing writing lowercase letters.
  
• writing numbers beyond 10. We went just past 100.
• weekly science books on various topics. These are once again from the "Lets Read About Science" books from the library. It is a very cool set of books for young students. They talk about science is an easy to understand way. We will continue with these for a while. I definitely recommend them.
• more practice with addition, subtraction, telling time and money. All of which Lili is doing great. I can't believe how quickly she picked up on counting out money since our previous attempts didn't turn out that well. Whether it was just timing or the way it was taught, it was much easier this time and she is doing great.
• we made more math "mats" (sheets of paper with a number written on each). Before we had them up to 10 now our set is up to 20. For math practice I call out an addition or subtraction problem and Lili runs, jumps, skips, etc... to the "mat" with the answer on it. It is fun and she loves it since it keeps her moving and I like it because it lets her practice doing the math in her head and not always seeing it on paper. A different way to practice math facts.
• introduced root words (dances/danced/dancing = dance)and compound words (beach+ball=beachball). The root words she still needs some help with but she caught on real quick to the compound words.
• review of food groups and what goes in each food group. Eating from the rainbow, we drew a rainbow and inside each color section wrote foods that were that color. Then pointed out which foods we like and which ones we have not tried yet.
• We have picked back up on writing to each other in Lili's writing journal.
• We have been watching a live hummingbird cam online. There are two baby birds and the mommy. Lili loves watching the mommy feed the babies. It is very cool. She will yell for me whenever the mommy bird comes to the nest.

And last week we enjoyed A LOT of snow! The blizzard of 2011. It wasn't good snow for a snowman but we had a huge mountain of snow (almost as tall as mommy) so Lili went sledding for the first time in our front yard. She LOVED it! It is getting really cold out now so this week we will probably be stuck in the house and only venture out for dance class. Lots of extra playing and getting ready for Valentine's Day.