Well, it’s unofficially official – DJ has started pre-kindergarten. Although he is beginning his third year of Montessori at home and he will be 5 years old in just over a month, with a November birthday he would not be able to start public school Kindergarten until next year. I’m somewhat hesitant about assigning grade level since homeschool can be so fluid, but I love the “first day of school” pictures each year. 

DJ loves all things math, so when we started Monday morning, he went straight to the Complete Bead Cabinet. He worked with the short chains for 1, 2, 3 & 4 and then selected the long chain of 5. He did not want to label it or do the skip counting, but he did want to explore how the chain was made up of 5 sections of 5 bars each with 5 beads on them, for a total of 125 beads. The 5 sections fold up into 5 squares and if we could manage to stack them, the 5 squares would make a cube. So 5 cubed is 125. 

When I asked DJ what he wanted to do next, he went straight for the Golden Beads. So I said, “Okay, what do you want to do – addition, subtraction, multiplication or division?”  He replied, “I want to do the one where mommy steals from my treasure.”  Okay, subtraction it is!  He chose 5,259 and I stole 2,136 from his pile which left him 3,123. This was not new to DJ but I was okay with starting an easy review. What I did notice as new was that DJ did almost all of the work, counting out the beads, finding the number cards and calculating the total. Aside from deciding how many to steal from him, I just sat and watched. 

I suggested that we do a division problem next. I laid out 4 pieces of colored paper, orange, yellow, green & blue, and said they were “kids” at a birthday party with a piñata. We rolled the place value dice to determine how many pieces of candy were in the piñata and were lucky enough that that number divided evenly by 4. 

DJ then proceeded to split the candy (Golden Beads) evenly among the kids (papers). For this problem that required a lot of exchanging. We started with 2 thousand cubes and I asked him to divvy them out. At first he put one each on blue & yellow but I told him orange & green were mad. 

So I asked him if he could break up the cubes, which he did by exchanging them for 20 hundred squares. Well, that’s one way of describing what he did. The longer version is that he set some hundred squares next to him, then he banged on a thousand cube, set it aside and tossed some hundred squares into a pile in front of him – pretending the cube had literally broken into 10 pieces. When he was exchanging hundred squares for 10-bars, he had them pass through a window as if he was getting them from a teller at a bank. He is full of SO much imagination. 

In the end, all of the beads were distributed and we counted each collection to be sure they had an even count of 588 each. Look at that smile on his face!

This week was full of firsts as DJ also started piano lessons. Despite my lack of musical skill, DJ has been obsessed with writing and singing his own songs since he started speaking. He took a preschool music class from his piano teacher this summer and enjoyed every class so I decided to start him on private lessons this fall. He loved his first lesson and practiced each day at home. 

After his piano practice the first day, I said we needed to do more school and he groaned. I’ve started a new option for him this year, either choose something to do or choose a random activity from a cup of Popsicle sticks. He didn’t want to do more “school” so he opted for a Popsicle stick. Imagine his surprise when his school “task” was to work with the bells! He was a very happy musical boy. 

He set each of the wood base bells on the table and selected one white base bell. He listened to the white control and then returned to the table to find its match. I was so happy to see how well he did the task as well as hoe focused he was. When he finished, he played the scale up one set and down the other. 

The next day, he decided to trust the Popsicle sticks again and randomly chose the Botany Cabinet. Yay!  This is one material purchase that I have doubted its worth. We rarely use it and I always feel out my element when we do. I absolutely do not have a green thumb. But the Popsicle sticks had spoken, so DJ removed the three drawers revealing 14 green leaf shapes cut out of yellow squares. We also laid out the cards to match them to and the control chart with their names. These leaves have some pretty strange names!  Acerose? Deltoid? We did some 3-part lessons with three of the shapes to learn their names. Part 1 – I point to the shape and say its name. Part 2 – I name a shape and ask DJ to point to the one I named. Part 3 – I point to a shape and ask DJ to name it. Maybe the next time we open the Botany Cabinet, those three shape names won’t seem so strange to us. 

The next Popsicle stick that DJ selected said “Read Books”. I took this opportunity to tell DJ about a list of books I found on Mensa For Kids. There are 64 books on the list and if we read all of them DJ will get a T-Shirt. We own 10 of the books, so we’ll start there and get the rest from the library. 

So that was our first week of school this year. The weather was still uncharacteristicly warm for our region so DJ enjoyed two play dates – one with neighbor friends when they got home from school and the other with another homeschool family.