Locals

I haven't blogged lately because we've had a lot of illness at our house. First DS2, then DS1 and I. We finally went to the doctor yesterday, so DS1 and I are both on antibiotics for strep. DS1 tested positive on the screen, and the doctor didn't even bother testing me. DS1 got asked his age and if he was in Kindergarten. He was pretty shy for the nurse (and extremely uncharacterictly reluctant to be examined), but did hold up 5 fingers and nod in the affirmative to the "K" question.

We've not gone to YEA! for 2 weeks in a row now. I actually miss it, and the boys definitely miss it and seeing their friends. Last week we had to cancel because there was a big funeral at the church. We had a park day instead and played with some of our YEA! friends. Yesterday YEA! still happened, but we stayed home. Now that I know we had/have strep, I'm really glad I didn't send DS1 with one of the other moms.

Even though I haven't been posting, I've still been keeping up with some local homeschooling friends' blogs. Here they are...
The Mandala Page - Becky,
Muddling Through - Cindy, and
geminig3 - MySpace Blog - Steph

Math Fun

The past week has included several fun unschoolish math experiences. DS1 found DH's abacus in the basement while helping me put up some shelves. I've never used an abacus, so DH taught DS1 how to use it. He got single digit addition and subtraction very quickly, but the place value of "tens" tripped him up. Since I remembered that our next lesson in Math-U-See was on place value, I told DS1 about it and asked if he'd like to learn something that would help make using the abacus easier. He was interested, so yesterday we got our Math-U-See stuff out and talked about place value of tens (Lesson 9).

A couple of weeks ago we went to a Board Game Club meeting at a fellow homeschooler's house. One of the games they played was Sorry! I had Sorry! as a kid, so we went to my dad's house to try to find it. It wasn't in any of the places I expected, so I suspected that I had already claimed it. DH found it in the basement yesterday while I was gone, and they all played. The boys and I played some more this morning. It is a game of mostly the luck of the draw, but there is some strategy for choosing which piece to move and selecting which way to use the card (some have options, like 7 can be split between 2 pieces, and 1 and 2 can be used to start a new piece or move a piece). We also played with "Imaginary Daddy" to have 4 players, so we took turns drawing, choosing, and moving Imaginary Daddy's pieces.