Wednesday, March 18, 2020

St. Patrick's Day During COVID 19

With schools closed here in Virginia, I am now homeschooling my grandson. 

To begin, we watched a video on YouTube about the origins of St. Patrick's Day, focusing on the symbols of Ireland and St. Patrick's Day such as the shamrock. 

Then, because the city library is closed, we watched a video of the children's book, Jamie O'Rourke and the Big Potato:  




Potato block printing of a shamrock








My grandson added a rainbow after we discussed the colors of the rainbow and how to remember the order: ROY G. BIV.















St. Patrick's Day Math: Sorting Lucky Charms' marshmallows, counting , and comparing groups.







Roy: Red, Orange, Yellow
G.: Green
Big: Blue, Indigo, Violet



Trivia:  Did you know that when you see a double rainbow the other rainbow is the inverse of the first rainbow?



Ten Frames were used to my grandson could add up the total number of marshmallows in his bowl of Lucky Charms.







With the other half of the potato from our potato block printing, we will experiment to see if anything will grow from the potato EYE if put in water.













Starting a potato journal and using a portable Word Wall to help with the spelling of subject-specific words.








Day 1
Day 2





We watched another video on YouTube of the storybook, How to Catch a Leprechaun.  Afterwards we did a directed drawing of a leprechaun.  Then my grandson wrote how he would catch a leprechaun.


When all school work was finished, we made St. Patrick's Day cupcakes.  (They were pretty ugly, but they tasted good!). Both of us were exhausted at the end of the day! 

Monday, March 16, 2020

I'm BACK!

It's been three years since I posted on my blog.  That's because my husband was diagnosed with cancer in April of 2017 and I was unable to finish the school year.  I took early retirement to care for him.  Then he passed away in March of 2018.  So I've been retired since then, getting my life back together and discovering what I'd like to do in the next season of my life.  I've missed many things about teaching, but not everything. Teachers, you know what those things are.  No need to spell it out.  

Now I have the best of both worlds.  A silver lining for me with the Coronavirus is that I  get to put my teacher hat back on to teach my grandson who is in kindergarten!  Today was our first day. Having only one student is quite different than a full classroom of 18 by yourself!  But what fun!  He told his mom after I left to go home, "Grandma is the best teacher because she was a teacher."  Hahahaha!  I guess that means I had a successful first day back!  

It's amazing how you can feel like you've really fallen behind in the field of education after three years.  So I welcome any suggestions of resources for teaching my kindergarten grandson.  Please just comment below!  I hope all of you are standing strong in this worldwide crisis.  Together we will come out of this better than we ever were!