Fun and Games Weekend
We had a pretty good weekend. My parents were in town for a conference/meeting, and my Dad came for a visit on Saturday afternoon. It had been a while since he’d seen the boys, so it was nice to catch up. Earlier on Saturday the boys each had their drama class as well. This morning the boys had skating lessons, and then Jim took Gareth with him to the bottle (refund) depot and library while I stayed home and played games with Daegan. (In between Jim worked on fixing my computer which has been acting up since a power surge last week.)
Daegan and I started with a game he’s never played before:
We adapted the rules to make it a more fair match: we counted only number of words found, not their length; I had to find words at least 5 letters long, and Daegan got twice as long (2 turns of the hourglass timer):
I was also quite generous in giving him tips on strategy, such as using “s” to make plurals, looking for rhymes, etc. Here’s the words he found on our final game:
And here’s our lists from a round earlier. I don’t think we found any words in common (and he found a 5-letter word I completely missed!):
This turned out to be a great way to have Daegs practice his spelling and penmanship. We’ll definitely give this a go again.
We then moved on to Connect 4, which gave Daegan a chance to practice being a good sport about losing (such a challenge for this 7-year old!), Make 10 Go Fish, and Guess Who?, all of which gave Daegan some practice in math and logic / reasoning. One of my goals for this year is to bring more games and play into our homeschooling: mission accomplished today! 
When Gareth got home he wanted to “do homeschool” with me, and specifically wanted to do more colour-by-number puzzles. These are great for the stage Gareth is at right now: he knows his numbers, he’s beginning to read (and can read several colour words—and is SOOO proud of this!), and he needs more fine motor practice with a writing implement. He and I coloured these two puzzles together:
The boys then watched a DVD Jim had seen at the library and thought would interest them: Darwin’s secret Notebooks. Daegan decided he needed some exercise and ran on the treadmill for a bit too:
Gareth also ran for a bit while watching the show, “just like you do Mommy!” (I watch recorded soccer or Daily Show / Colbert while getting in some exercise in the mornings). Yay! I am helping them establish at least ONE good habit!
We finished off the day with a delish pasta for dinner (adults had pasta with sauteed mushrooms, sweet onion, red pepper and cherry tomato halves; I added a bit of feta to mine; Jim added olives to his. Sooooo nummy!) and an hour of reading with the boys before bed. We’re just a couple chapters from the end of Trumpet of the Swan which the boys have really enjoyed. Any suggestions for novels / chapter books to try next?