Ash & Ace: Our first week of school in photographs

We had an amazing first week of 4th grade and preschool. Here's a little bit of what we did!

Chalky face after making chalk pictures in the driveway

Don't forget chores!

Sometimes you need a big brother's help when you're stuck on a puzzle

Math

Basket of book choices for Asher's daily free reading time

This week I let Asa try an alphabet fishing game I made back when Asher was in preschool. First I made a fishing rod by attaching a piece of twine to a wooden dowel, with a magnet tied to the end.

I used a pack of fish-shaped bulletin-board decorations (from the dollar bin at Target) and wrote a capital and lowercase letter on each one. Then I taped a metal paperclip to the mouth of each fish.

Then, Asa fished. When he caught a fish, he had to tell me what letter it was, what sound it made, and a word that begins with that sound. We also played another way in which I put out 3 or 4 fish and then asked him to fish for a particular letter.

Here's a fine-motor skills activity for Asa. He had to use the scissor thing (if you know what this contraption is actually called, let me know!) to pick up and move small objects into a bowl.

Picking up some buttons

We learned about the Sepoy Mutiny this week in history, including the introduction of the Lee-Enfield Rifle. To demonstrate how much faster it was to use the Enfield Rifle cartridge as opposed to manually measuring out gunpowder and loading the guns, Asher did this little activity using items we had at home. It took him 19 seconds to load his rifle the old way, and only 7 seconds to load the Enfield cartridge. Now it was easier to see why the British wanted the Sepoy to use those instead!