Spring Break

It's Spring Break! It's been weird for me because, for some reason, I keep thinking it's a day later than it is.

I had originally planned to have things somewhat scheduled, so that there'd be a routine to the day. Plans, as they so often do, changed. :) I had forgotten about ds's dentist appointment Monday morning, but remembered before the appointment, so there was that. Ran some errands while he was at his appointment, then we went to the museum in the afternoon. That took care of Monday.

Yesterday, we made a visit to the John Janzen Nature Centre, which took up part of our day. The idea was to make a walk in the woods to check out nature, but the path was still so full of icy snow that our focus was instead on making sure we didn't slip and fall! The kids, as usual, had fun inside checking out the tiger salamander and the snake and all the other things they have there. Then my 2 and I had our kung fu in the evening.

So, other than those activities, there hasn't been much going on. I've had some Easter colouring pages printed off and there's been, naturally lots of playing. Dd and I have been doing some crochet--she from a book she got at the library with simple ideas for kids; I've been working on Amigurumis. The patterns I have aren't turning out as small as I would like them to be. They're probably not supposed to be as small as I have in my mind that I want, but I want them smaller! :) I'm on my 2nd and think I'd be able to modify them to get them smaller.

Before leaving last night, my 5yo niece was kind of searching for something to do and I pulled out a box of body matching puzzles--2-piece puzzles where you match up the word with the body part. She wanted to do them, so we worked through them together. I had been looking for this little math workbook that I'd found that I thought she might enjoy doing the simple addition and subtraction, but we found the print practice workbook ( :( lol ) and she wanted to do that. I managed to find the math while she was working on c's and I asked if she wanted to keep working with the letters or switch to the math. She decided to switch to the math. Since we haven't done a whole lot of math work yet, I decided to simply use the bead frame (all of the results were 10 or under) because she likes the bead frame and it would be easy for her to use it to do the simple work. It was kind of like the snake game, but on paper, and not going above 10.

She probably ended up working close to an hour yesterday afternoon and was still going strong when her mom showed up. She kept going and I told her she could keep working on it in the morning, because her mom was waiting for her. lol. Her sister already had her shoes and coat on, and there was the 5yo at the table, still working on math (a different page--one where you have to do some math to figure out what colour a portion of the image needs to be coloured).

Naturally, it left me thinking that I don't do nearly enough with her. She is so ready and willing to do more. Of course, she's doing stuff now she won't do again in school until grade 1 (she's heading into kindergarten in the fall), but I'm thinking that since she'll be coming to me after school next year, I may just do some after-schooling with her to keep this kind of thing going. But I'm getting ahead of myself, as usual. For right now, I need to really figure out a plan for our school weeks so that she gets more from me! When I think of just her, the plan is easy. But it's not so easy given there are 4 or 5 others in the house on any given day. 4 or 5 others at completely different levels and doing completely different things. Maria Montessori never wrote about how to have toddlers all the way through high schoolers in one room. ;)