Having your child as your student provides some unique challenges, but also some unique delights, that Teacher Lindsey and I are experiencing. For this week, the highlights have been listening to the descriptions of our day filtered through the boys’ retelling of the day to the rest of the family.

Victoria Vowel Owl. Victoria was mentioned a lot! She taught us about how tricky vowels can be with short sounds and long sounds, and other sounds that we’ll learn about later. She taught us the “The Ants on the Apple” song, and then added “Bouncing a Ball.” She swoops along to show us how to form our letters.

The gym! We were able to use the gym for our recess time this week. You can trampoline into the foam pit – but you have to watch out not to jump on your friend’s head. There are balancing beams, bars, and mats for forward rolls.

We got to do art. We mix colors and learned about primary colors and how to make -um – other colors.

The way our senses protect us and how we protect them. We talked about seeing, hearing, and feeling. We learned about how our eyebrows, eyelids, lashes, and tears protect our eyes. We learned how vibrations make sound, and our ears hear the sounds. We learned about how our skin protects our insides and helps us learn when something might be dangerous like too hot or too cold.

We started letter books with the song for A and B. We wrote about what we saw and heard at the ocean. We practiced our letters and writing our names and friends’ names with capital letters.

We found rocks that might have dinosaur fossils and we might turn the airport into a shop, or a museum, or maybe a museum shop. We read a book about fossils and learned how stuff in the water can make bones turn to rock. But not when you are alive.

We had math centers with numbers and patterns and dice. Our calendar has lots of sunny days, not like today. And we read some books.

But mostly we play. “You play?” asked a skeptical older brother. “Yup. We play a lot. But you can learn and play and play and learn.”