We finished rowing Corduroy, a book I can remember reading as a child. In fact, the book we read was my childhood copy of Corduroy! This is such a sweet story about a little teddy bear finding his home and the adventures he had in an attempt to find himself a button to replace the one he lost.

Sweet Pea did Teddy Bear Shape Matching.

Let me just say this: Working with my girls one-on-one is a piece of cake compared to trying to teach them together at this age! I have learned this by doing Before Five in a Row with them this summer! Every activity that we did together was pretty chaotic and I sometimes questioned why I was doing this to myself but we did manage to do a few fun games with Corduroy. I will definitely stick to our normal routines of schooling separately this Fall! (Sweet Pea in the morning while Little Bug does her own thing in the playroom most of the time. And Little Bug in the afternoon once Sweet Pea is down for her nap!)

We did a How Many Pennies in the Piggy Bank? game. The girls picked a number and then had to count out that number of pennies to place in the piggy bank. I gave Little Bug numbers between 11 and 20 and Sweet Pea numbers between 1 and 10.

Later, once Sweet Pea was down for her nap, Little Bug did some Penny Math. She picked two numbers and made an addition problem with them. Then she used the pennies to figure out the answer. In the picture below she was working on 9+9=18.

This activity actually went very well with both girls participating at the same time. I laid the Button Shapes on the ground. Then the girls took turns jumping like a frog to the shape that I told them to jump to!

I should have done Button Graphing with just Little Bug, but Sweet Pea was there too…creating chaos! We managed to make a graph and then Little Bug and I talked about which button had the most, the least and the same.

Doing crafts together usually goes very well. Both girls LOVED making their very own Corduroy bear! I gave them crayons, buttons and glue and let them decorate to their heart’s desire. They worked for about half an hour on their bears!

We have one more row for this summer, Jessie Bear, What Will You Wear?

- Elaine