Thursday Highlights

1. Today was a teacher inservice/ conference day (as is tomorrow) so Ben did not have school. The JCC offers day-long programs for occasions such as these, so today Ben went with them on a field trip to a corn maze and went swimming in the indoor pool among other activities. Tomorrow he goes with them to Space Kidets, an indoor playspace with inflatables, arcade, etc, and swimming again. He is having a nice break from school!

2. This morning I stopped in at the book store and found some materials to help Ben practice his writing. I got some cards that are dry-erase-board material on one side, with a dry erase marker. I got a set for practicing numbers 1-30, uppercase letters, and lowercase letters. You practice tracing each letter, starting at the circle and ending at the star and following the directional arrows. You can erase it and draw it over as many times as you want. And there's extra room on the cards to practice free-hand as well. Tonight I showed Ben the number set, since he'd been telling me he wanted to practice writing numbers with me. He seemed to enjoy being able to easily write and erase as much as he wanted. I am rather baffled by the fact that he can draw a perfect figure 8, but the number 3 stymies him even after I explained that it's just like a B without the straight line, and he can make a perfect capital B. During the course of our practice, Joel discovered that he writes his own "5" and "7" improperly. So Joel needed some remedial work as well. Ben helped him with his 5's.

3. After I picked the kids up this evening we were playing in the cul de sac before dinner, and Ben and our neighbor Miller found a snake in the street. As they were watching the snake a car came down the street and ran right over it... the car was going very slowly, since it's a dead end street, but neither me nor the other adult present really wanted to pick a snake up out of the road... so unfortunately we all just stood there and watched the poor snake get run over. Poor thing. The snake was rather mangled after the event, but still alive! Barely. Ben and Miller were beyond fascinated with this event, and kept riding their scooters over to look at it. "Look! Look! It moved! It is only a little dead! Are those it's guts?" Rebecca walked up to it, bent over with her hands on her knees, and said "SQUISHY! Yuck!" Shortly thereafter Joel came home from work, and inadvertantly put the snake out of its misery...

4. Rebecca looked up at the moon in the sky tonight and said "Look! Banana!" I am a little concerned about what's going on in that head of hers that she thinks a banana could be up in the sky. It reminds me of this book of hers that we have, and every picture in it is of some kind of animal. And every time she gets to the picture of the star fish (no matter how many times I have told her it is a star fish) she says "COOKIE!" I think she might fail all those tests where you have to single out which thing DOES NOT BELONG WITH THE OTHERS.