The children

Here they are! Josh cleaned his old booster seat off for Samantha. She's trying it out for the first time. She is able to sit up very well in the seat and enjoys it in small doses.

Josh's Creations

Practicing one-on-one correspondence and developing fine motor control with melty beads:



Greater Than / Less Than Chamber:
A Josh invention inspired by the mathematical concepts of greater than and less than. We used Montessori Number Rods to learn about this today while Samantha was napping, and Josh built the chamber by himself a little while later.


Greater than is on the left, and less than is on the right.

Montessori inspired activities

This was our first week of Sonlight core 1. In science, we are learning about magnets. I set up this tray Montessori style, because I think it's more fun and Josh relates better to the results this way.

hmm...our background seems to have sprouted feet! Josh built this crazy tower during "quiet time" recently. I don't know how he managed to balance all those crossing rods.

beauty shots

TRAINS TRAINS TRAINS

After playing with his Lego train set daily, Josh decided to set up his Thomas set. He built this all by himself. Luke and I were impressed. This was the first time he was able to make such a complicated set-up. I especially liked the double-decker action on the bridge.

In this photo, he wanted the engine's face to show! He also looked at the bottom of the engine and told me he thought it was Oliver because it said o-l-i-v-e-r. It's great to see him learn and grow!

P.S. the photos are sometimes blurry because I have developed a strong dislike of how the flash on my camera makes everyine looke slightly orange. So when I turn the flash off, any movment causes blurriness. I hope to someday have a camera that will do better taking photos of moving objects in inside lighting conditions!

Sitting Up

Samantha sat up by herslf for 8 whole seconds today! Josh and I were excited. These photos were from this week-end. Samantha was "reading" a library book. I've been reading picture books to her. She loves looking at the picture and trying to touch the images.

no time to write...or maybe, just maybe, no brain!

Well Samantha is rolling everywhere. She's mobile in a sideways type of way! She's been trying to reach the butterfly mobile and is trying to pick up patterns off of fabric. It's so funny. She'll try to grab a cartoon-ish fish off her bouncy seat to gnaw on, or try to grab printed images off the page.

Josh is enjoying her and usually likes to "babysit" while I try to get something done around the house. He's actually pretty good for about 20 minutes and that is SO helpful to me. He also tells me
1. He'd like to live on Neptune because it's nice and cold.
And
2. He'd like to get a job, maybe doing yard work or babysitting.