Beyblade Reading and Volcano Making

Alec still wasn't feeling 100% better today so he elected to have another couch/ TV day, but I could tell his brothers were too antsy for this so I told them to get ready for school.

Ian really wanted to put together a volcano kit he got from Christmas, and while it frustrated him a bit, I really didn't help out much at all.  I told him he had to sit and read ALL the directions until he understood them and then asked him to summarize them for me.  I did help as needed but for the most part I kept saying "this is your project, not mine."

It was hard for me as I am that kind of mom that likes to take over.  I can do things faster, neater, and for lack of a better term, better.

But, I am trying real hard not to take over, especially not when learning is involved.  I know he learned so much more today doing this project on his own than if I had taken over and demonstrated while he watched (which if you read this blog, you know that's often how science goes).

He assembled the mold, mixed the plaster and poured it all into the mold.  I even had him clean up after himself.  We set the mold aside to dry and hopefully tomorrow he will paint the volcano. 

While Ian worked on his science project, Evan and I read a new book.  I had a set of books lying around called Word Family Readers and asked him to help me read Pat's Cat's (the - at family).  

We then played a sight word game called Spin- A- Word.  I saw this idea on Pinterest and followed the link to this blog.  It caught my eye because it uses tops and I immediately thought we could do this with Beyblades!

My boys LOVE their Beyblades and I thought this would get Evan very excited!  Ian asked to play too, even though the words were too simple for him, he had fun playing with Evan.

For math Evan worked on a dot to dot page and then asked if we could play Sorry! so he could practice counting.  Who could argue with that logic?

After working on his volcano, Ian decided to just to the next lesson in his McRuffy math book.  He was frustrated because, once again, the lesson ended with three digit subtraction problems that involved borrowing.

I know he HATES these so we made a deal.  If he can get all 6 problems right he doesn't have to do them anymore; we'll just cross them out on the next few pages.  It is meant to be a review but he often rushes through them and makes mistakes.  He thought this was a great idea and went off to finish his work.

I reminded him that he can add his answer to the subtrahend and he should end up with the minuend.  Unfortunately, the very first problem I looked at had a mistake.  I stopped correcting, told him to check ALL his answers.  I would give him a second chance but not a third.

He came back with another mistake and asked if he could try again tomorrow.  Of course I said sure.

That pretty much ended our school day and the boys took off on their own to play and rest.