Rounding the Corners

Some days are rougher than others, and today had a few little snags.  Anna has some allergies that affect her digestion pretty bad.  She's allergic to corn, soy, wheat, and dairy, and has a sensitivity to sugar.  Due to a snafu on my part she had one of her allergens hidden inside of another product.  As a result her tummy was upset pretty badly this morning.  Thankfully she recovered fairly well, though she still had a lack of focus for most of the day.

To give her a chance to let her tummy settle, we watched a video on Netflix for science called "Wings of Life" by Disney Nature. It was incredibly informative and interesting, and carried on the lessons we have been having about plant life.  Of particular interest to our plant study lately is the section that discusses how flowers are fertilized in order to make fruit.  Anna didn't make it all the way through the video (she fell asleep because it was so calming and her tummy was upset), so we will watch more another day.

After she woke up we decided to go to Trader Joe's for our social studies lesson today (and also for some rice-bread and sun-butter).  We talked to the cashier about her job and what she does at the store, which was a great lesson for Anna on what people do to help our community at the grocery store.  We also learned about a fun game they have going at our local store where there is a stuffed javelina that is "loose in the store" and every day they hide him somewhere in the store.  If you find him you can tell the cashier and they will give you a sucker (lucky for Anna - it is allergy-free).  This also opened up the door for a natural course of talking about and looking up javelina when we got home today.

Once we arrived home it was back to business as usual.  We worked on understanding different roles in the community and defining them.  This included things like waitress, judge, veterinarian, plumber, etc.  For language arts we worked on long, short, and double vowels some more, and she also read a short book.

In math, we learned about rounding numbers.  This seemed to be a difficult concept for Anna, and after an hour of being frustrated for us both, I did a little homework myself on how to help her better understand.  This website suggested drawing a street with houses on it, and naming each of the families in the houses a number by tens, starting with zero and working up to the highest number you would like to round to.  For us we went 0, 10, 20, 30, 40, and 50.  Below the street, we wrote out different numbers that represented people who would be visiting the neighborhood.  These "people" would need to find the house closest to them in order to go for their visit.  So, when the person named "3" came to the neighborhood, I asked Anna to tell me which home 3 was closest to.  She got it right away!

Not every day can be filled with fun crafts and easy successes, but we are doing our best to make learning an experience for Anna that she will remember fondly.  I like that when we hit a snag we are able to adjust our day and our learning style to better fit her needs.