Halloween Party Today!

I'm having my homeschool Halloween party today. If everybody can make it, we'll be 27 people. I've never had that many people in the house so it'll be interesting to see how we all fit. It's a good age mix and we've got a scavenger hunt in the neighbourhood planned plus probably put on a video after that since it doesn't look like it's going to be super warm today to be able to spend more time outside.

Unfortunately, it looks like Jane's got kids who may be too sick to come. :( I was hoping to watch Sam in action. :D He looks like such a character in her photos on her blog. [See blog link to the right.]

So, what do the kids and I have to do this morning in preparation?

• Cleaning/organizing: put some stuff in the basement to make more room, dust, vacuum, make sure the main bathroom is clean, sweep and wash the kitchen floor, cover up the school shelves with sheets so the materials don't get touched, move the kitchen table, bring chairs into the living room. Make signs for the upstairs doors: Bathroom and Do Not Enter.
• Decorate!
• Food preparation: I have another loaf of green bread to make, sandwiches to make and punch to prepare. Shoot, I forgot to make ice cubes last night. Should do that asap. Oh, another shoot--we forgot to make our ice hand to put in the punch. I don't think it'd be ready in time if I prepared it now. :( Oh, I also don't have any new gloves to use. Shoot.

That's not too bad.

On a totally different note, I started working out presentation plans for the 12yo for math. It feels so good knowing what I'm going to direct him to do, and it's broken down into individual lessons. This isn't a week plan, but kind of a unit plan, in the order I will present it to him. Since he doesn't turn to materials on his own and work on his own, I'm going to prepare worksheets for him to accompany each presentation. I just need to keep going with that planning throughout the weekend for next week. I feel like I'm returning to Montessori--not sure how I completely strayed, but I did.

What's on my plan some of you may be asking? Well, it's upstairs at the moment and everybody's asleep still, so I'll try to do this just by memory:

Addition:

facts--done with facts booklets and/or worksheets
-bead bars
-Strip Board
-the addition charts, in order (you can see an image here)

larger operations--to be done concurrently with facts practice
-Golden Beads (incorporating place value work--this seems to be a difficult area for him and he needs a little lesson to see what it means when a workbook or textbook asks "2 hundred more", "4 tens more")
-forgot to add this one last night: Snake Game
-Dot Game
-Bead Frame (mine is just a regular abacus--doesn't look like this one!)
-Decimal Fraction board
-word problems

related items
-algebra (a+a+a; a+b+a+c; 1 + a = 4; etc.)
-perimeter of triangles, quadrilaterals, irregular shapes
-patterns: 1, 4, 7, ...
-binary

Oh, it's already time for me to get myself going. I think that was the extent of my plan. There were little additional details here and there, but can't remember them. And, to be honest, this plan is really applicable to dd and ds and the 10yo (coming back Monday! yay!) But somehow laying it out like this lets me see the whole picture and I can now work my way down through the details.