Heeee'res Johnny!

Took yesterday off and went to Mom and Dad's. Today, we resumed our small study of Johnny Appleseed. We read "Johnny Appleseed" by Aliki today. And I tell you, not many hard facts are known about John Chapman, because every story we've read has been different. I guess that's the difficulty of studying a "tall tale", everybody's got an opinion. The other day, we learned that he died of pneumonia and upon asking Lillie in review Saturday what he died of she thought for a second and said "He died of 'no money'". Ahh, just when you think life with kids is boring they pop off with something funny like that! Anywho, we did a basic reading lesson this morning where Lillie continued constructing her memory verses using Post It's. She now has about 10 words memorized pretty good. We played "Sight Word Memory" also. For math, we played a matching game where I took a construction paper apple and cut it in half. On one side I wrote the numbers 1-10, on the other I drew the corresponding amount of seeds. Then she matched them. She played a few math games on the computer. I also made a file folder game called "Apple Count" that will give both kids alot of practice with counting and for Anna some good addition practice as well. Here's a picture of it.

Here's how to play: One player rolls the dice. Counts up that many spaces on the board. Whatever color they land on, they have to draw a card from the pile with the same color. Then works the addition problem by placing the red apples (here buttons painted red) from the bushel basket onto the tree. For example , if the card says 2+2= , then you'd place two apples on the tree, add two more, then count them all together. For Jackson, I just work the problem as he watches, being sure I explain how I'm doing it, even if he doesn't really understand. Then he counts out that number of apples and puts them on the tree.
We also sewed seed sacks from felt like Johnny Appleseed might have carried. I sewed Jackson's for him (for obvious reasons)and helped Lillie Anna, but she sewed a good bit by herself and did a pretty good job. Here's the pictures of her sewing and the two of them together with their Johnny Appleseed Seed Sacks.



Anna's new chore is vaccuming. Here she is vaccuming her bedroom.