Enjoying SQUILT, Making Math Fun, and Evaluating School so Far - Collage Friday

We had such a wonderful Friday.  We did two SQUILT lessons and I spent some time playing math games with Bear since her math is all review and I didn't want to hand her a page of 2-digit addition questions just for the sake of doing math.

SQUILT:

We did the whole SQUILT lesson (affiliate link) snuggled on the couch with the iPAD, then moved to the table for the drawing and writing portion.

J-jo is illustrating Chaconne in G Minor by Francois Couperin.  It's a sad piece, being in G-minor, so he drew Mommy in a hospital bed with the doctor (in brown), Daddy, himself, and Bear all standing around her. (And since I know so many will want to know why he would draw that...For those of you who knew we were pregnant with twins and that I was on bed rest, I spent a couple of weeks in the hospital and lost both twins, with two and a half weeks of hope that I might carry the second to term.  They were 19 and 23 weeks and were beautiful boys, albeit ever so tiny.  Obviously, we are all grieving, and the children are too, even at 4 and 6 and if anyone has advice on how to help grieving children, please feel free to leave some in the comments.  It would be very helpful.)

Bear is illustrating The Prince of Denmark's March by Jeremiah Clarke.  It's a happier, livelier, regal piece.  The version we were listening to had a trumpet and a pipe organ, so those showed up in her illustration.

SQUILT was fun.  The kids were excited to do this again.  It had been a while since our last SQUILT lesson.  We had listened to the Chaconne a couple of weeks ago, but hadn't done the drawing part.  It was nice to review it today.

Making Math Fun:

Bear's workbook pages looked like this today:

 Quite boring, mundane, repetitive, lonesome work.

I remembered a game we used to play to practice her addition facts.  I forget what they call it in the Rightstart books, but it's like the card game of War, except that each player turns over two cards, adds them up and the player with the largest number gets the cards.  We play this version with J-jo often.

Today's version had us turning over 4 cards to create two-digit numbers.  Below, Bear is adding up 33+63.  She did get more challenging ones involving regrouping, but aside from occasional, random, careless mistakes, she does very well at adding in her head and using mental math strategies.  

Next, we played a fraction game from Relentlessly Fun, Deceptively Educational.  I printed this ages ago and we never got to play it.  We changed it a bit because I was too lazy to go upstairs and get the flat marbles.  We used the cuisenaire rods, not only to keep score, but to help us figure out the answer.  Bear liked this game better than the above game.  By the end of the game, she was using her multiplication skills to figure out the answers and no longer needed the rods.  The game is meant to be played to 50, but Bear insisted we play to 100.

Evaluating School So Far:

We pretty much had a month and a half off school after we started due to the above stated reason.  Some basic school was done - at friends' houses - but it deviated largely from my "master plan".  I am beyond caring right now and have devised a new "master plan" that will be more manageable and allow more time for memory making. Nothing fancy, nothing Pinterest-y, nothing big - just plenty of time being in each other's company and spending quality, not school related, time together.  All three of us need that right now.

Linked to Collage Friday at Homegrown Learners.