What's Happening at Fisherville Academy?

We're so glad you asked!

Books, books, books.
Current read-aloud: Peter Pan
Current independent reading books:
E: The Strawberry Girl
L: Emily's Runaway Imagination
N: Mr. Popper's Penguins

Angela's current book: Briefer History of Time

We wrapped up our visit with the New Kingdom of Ancient Egypt today. We spent time today on the discovery of Tut's tomb! Someday I hope to visit Cairo and see Tut for myself! N really enjoyed making detailed colorings on the King Tut funeral mask coloring page as I read aloud a book on King Tut. E was fascinated that Tut died when he was Uncle EE's age. L just liked to talk about how old Tut was when he was made pharoah, how old he was when he died, what year Howard Carter discovered the tomb. Numbers, numbers, numbers!

(L discovered something called Powerball over the weekend. Look out!)

Our Family Team Time, the character education we do every morning, is one of the most critical parts of their education! One of my favorite quotes: Character Education isn't just something else on my plate. It IS the plate!
That comes from the the 4th and 5th R's. For more info on character education in the classroom look at this article.

In the daily course of parenting there are tons of opportunites for character training but many times I feel this training is done as a response to some action that isn't desirable. It becomes correction instead of instruction in a non-conflict time. Our daily Team Time gives me the non-conflict time so that they are more resceptive to the ideas we talk about.

This morning we worked on how to introduce ourselves to others. Little nuggets of info, like how to shake hands and make eye contact. Stuff that I might forget to mention to them until there was some reason to introduce the topic. Now I can pro actively talk everyday about some issue of their social/character development.

Today we delved into the new kiddo nutritional pyramid that was recently released by the government. The one area they are really bad about is drinking enough water. They get one glass of juice at breakfast and a glass of water at lunch. Then they may not drink anything until they get Crystal Light lemonade with dinner. They've got to start drinking more water!! As for the concept behind the eating pyramid, they got the hang of it pretty quickly. There is even an online computer game based on the pyramid! We've got the pyramid hanging on the fridge and at their meals they determined what portions of the pyramid where represented on their plate!