A Little Bit of Homeschooling

That's all we're getting done these days. We've been busy with lots of learning, but not necessarily quantifiable learning. But just to provide some evidence of actual academic and critical thinking, I took a few pictures. (Still have not found the little video camera. I think Chris will have to cough up the digital camera he took to college and never uses. Spring Break isn't that far away!)

Here's a page of Hannah's Building Thinking Skills book. She loves it. And it makes her think.

Several times a week we've been setting up shop. Sometimes it's groceries, sometimes it's clothes, but this time it was our own Littlest Pet Shop. We collected some of Hannah's Pet Shop toys, and added in a few real pet things to our "store" . I mean, who could resist a chewed nylon bone with lint on it? Especially when it's only $0.66. Or, maybe you'd rather have a lizard for $0.50? A fish with half a tail? To get that beauty you've got to have 100 pennies. Or 10 dimes. Or a paper dollar. Or a John Tyler dollar coin.

Hannah is pondering her purchases.

We are only using pennies, dimes and dollars right now. I've been trying to get her comfortable with the two symbols we use for money. The "$" and the "¢ " . In addition to making American coins as confusing as possible, Americans also like to write things out like this:

$0.78, which we read as "78 cents". Does it say 78¢ ? No. What it actually says is "zero dollars and 78/100ths of a dollar". One more tick on the confusion side.

But Nan is learning that she can read it as "78 cents".

I made a whole bunch of price tags, some with $ and some with C. Some are easy amounts of money, and some are difficult.

She's learning how to pay exact change. And what happens if she doesn't have exact change. We're not even going to start thinking about nickels or quarters. Or sales tax (heaven help us). We're going in baby steps. And we're having fun!


We also have been making Valentines, baking, going to a new swimming teacher, piano lessons, drama, Pottery class (new this week!), yoga, library, going to Special Olympics swimming for the first time, playing in the snow (it will never melt...we got another inch yesterday), watching the Olympics and battling the new medical insurance for coverage for Hannah's CPAP.

May your Valentine's day be filled with love!

p.s. Argh at Blogger's formatting!