School Fun!

Emmie has a homework packet every week that she has to complete. She has math papers she has to do, reading she has to complete and then there is a "your choice" section. She can do one of her ipad programs for math or ELA or she can do things like rainbow write her spelling words or pretty much anything you can come up with that's educational. Her teacher has encouraged parents to come up with creative things to do for this sections. Things like playing Monopoly or baking muffins or cookies. Normally we knock this out early in the week (we get a new packet every Thursday) but this week we were slow getting it done. So today I was trying to figure out what we could do and I realized that the dinner we were having tonight was a pretty easy dinner to fix and Emmie loves to help me in the kitchen so I asked her if she wanted to help me make dinner. She was super excited so we turned on some music and we had a great time spending some time together!
I have to say I was really amazed by all the things she could do to help me! We've baked things a few times for this section of homework so she's gotten pretty good at understanding measurements like 1 cup, 1/2 cup, etc.
For dinner we had pork chops, fried okra, and mac and cheese. The pork chops had to marinate so I had done that earlier in the day. However Emmie was able to fix just about all of the rest of our meal! I gave her step by step directions and she did a great job following them! She washed and cut the okra (and still has all her fingers!), measured out and mixed together the corn meal and the flour (and we talked about how it was a 1:1 ratio) for the okra. She boiled the water and cooked the noodles, grated the cheese, layered the noodles and cheese, measured out the milk and added in the eggs for the mixture to go over the macaroni and poured them in the dish and set the time on the microwave. I grilled the pork chops and fried the okra and then she plated all of our meals! She also filled up JP's milk cup for him at dinner and had to estimate where 1/2 way was (they worked on estimating in math recently). I was so, so impressed by how well she did and we had so much fun doing this together...we all thanked Emmie for a yummy meal!









So yesterday at dinner we had soup and Ellie starts saying something about chicken soup with rice. Honestly, I was doing about three other things and half listening to her. Then she rattles off the "October" section of the Chicken Soup with Rice poem by Maurice Sendak. I was SO impressed! Apparently they have done something with the poem in school. I couldn't get her to tell me anything about it but she knew September and October! This is my child who NEVER tells me what's going on in school and is so low key about everything. I think she was pretty proud of herself for shocking us with her recitation!