Almost Four!

I cannot believe my baby is turning four tomorrow! Time has been speeding up lately.

Henry is reading well with books for 2nd or 3rd grade.

He has learned about multiplication and division (from a TV show, I guess?) and loves to do simple math problems. I try to present him with word problems from real life and whenever we are waiting around. We just started talking about negative numbers. I guess will start to work on place values soon, but I sort of want to wait a bit to see if he figures it out on his own before I present him with anyone else's methods.

We are learning about plants (along with a Bible lesson about vines and branches :), and this is the first topic where he seems to really understand the books we're reading. It probably helps that I actually bought the books for this topic from scholastic instead of just collecting whatever we had lying around! Henry actually dug through the learning games to find a "root viewer" activity (a deep pot with a plastic window on one side so you can observe the roots), after we read the books about growing plants. I plan on doing the carnation in colored water experiment and a few others when we get home from our vacation, as well as some leaf crafts. Our next science topic is "Nest", or animal homes, which I think will make a good overview topic for a more complicated animal study I am planning for later in the year. Eventually I want to tie together an animal study with a geographical study/continent boxes. Basically we will study a continent, going through some of the countries and talking about the cultures, etc. While we are reading about that country we will study some animals from that place and classify them on a chart.

The final area I am thinking about is handwriting. I was sure that Henry was either behind in fine motor skills or else too much of a perfectionist to try writing. Every time I suggested he try he refused. Then tonight at dinner he started to do a word puzzle on a restaurant place mat and formed nearly perfect letters. I couldn't believe it! That stinker was holding out on me :) I think I may need to find a good incentive to get him interested in practicing more. We shall see...