first

"Close your eyes Miss Carolyn. I have a surprise for you" Natale greeted me on Tuesday morning. She presented me with a beautiful 3D flower/tissue paper art project she had made with her grandma.

Our busy Tuesday included a "Never been done before" when Natale braved up to hold her first chicken. She enjoys going to the chicken pen to deliver chicken snacks or collect eggs despite the fact that she finds much of what she encounters there as "gross and yucky".  We have one hen that is more open to the idea of being picked up than the rest of the sisters. Natale had petted her while I held her but finally decided to try holding the hen herself. She was quite pleased with herself when she accomplished her goal. I told her that now that she was on holding terms with this hen she needed to name it (tied in nicely to our creation story study). She thought for a while (all owls think a lot) and decided on Cinderella. We also read a book together on hatching chicks in preparation for our soon to be egg hatching project. In her Learning Journal she wrote the sentence "Today I held my first chicken."

For snack time we got out the apple peeler/corer and cranked out some Pink Lady Apple slices to put on the dehydrator. Natlale didn't remember having dried apples before although she loves dried mango. 

I needed to run to the post office and fruit market in the afternoon so we made a an assignment of finding one word for each letter of the alphabet. Natale carried her clipboard through the market copying down words from the signs identifying fruits and veggies. By the time we left the market she had 17 letters completed. The young man checking us out saw her list and told her what good work she had done.

(quality control strikes again)

I got a good chuckle out of her verbal and creative giftings working together as we played a game of memory while waiting for her mom to arrive. I made the traditional game into a language lesson by adding the requirements that when you turned over a playing piece you had to say the name of the animal pictured (the word is included next to the picture), the letter it starts with, and the sound that letter makes). Natale tuned over a worm piece but called it a caterpillar. When I pointed out the "w" at the beginning of the word she replied "Waterpiller".

Week four packed full of learning-Check!