Week of 19 June

We're slowly easing back into a few things, but we have a few vacation trips planned, and it is summer after all! So, we'll probably have "spurts" of activity here and there.

Phonics/Reading:

Abby is nearly halfway through Funnix 2. Because the rest of the program really feels like we're just building fluency, I'm starting to thinking about dropping it and moving towards a phonics-based spelling program and just having her read aloud to me regularly... She still enjoys the stories, though...

ABCs:

We went over the letter E this week. Ellie has decided she's going to really play along and learn some letters too. It's been a gradual interesting, mostly with her demanding to be held up to point at the letters and say what they say (when I prompt her) when Emmett does the same on his coconut tree. Well, imagine our surprise when we realized that Ellie knows the letters T, O, and S!

We also got cuisenaire rods in the mail and with them came this awesome book about the alphabet. Emmett LOVES the rods, so adding in this will be perfect for our letters.

Five in a Row:

The circus came to town! I hurried and tried to capitalize on such a fun event with a quick rowing of Mirette on the Highwire by Emily Arnold McCully.

We found France on our map.

Abby is fairly familiar with France thanks to Fancy Nancy. We found a video on youTube about the Eiffel tower and watched it.

We talked about practice and perseverance. We also talked about boasting.

We learned what a compound word is and used a game from homeschoolshare to reiterate it. Ellie loves the pocket that holds the words.

Making our own highwire and attempting to walk it was on my list of to-dos, but the kids beat me to it. :)

And, of course, we went to the circus!

Getting a picture of the tightrope walkers was fairly difficult from our seats with the low lighting, but I did my best! The kids were riveted during most of the circus, but especially during this part.

Life:

Like I mentioned, we got our Cuisenaire Rods in the mail. I am fascinated by Miquon and the C Rods that it uses because in some ways, I manipulate numbers in ways that are emphasized by the use of the rods. I actually thought Emmett would love the rods, and I'm right. He played with them for an hour on the first day. Since then, when I pull them out, it's Emmett who is fascinated with it. Abby has a push-me-along personality whereas Emmett's is much more discovery oriented. Abby will manipulate the rods if I encourage it, but she doesn't show much interest in them.

We did try out Funnix Beginning Math. It was a free download that was offered in the month of June. It starts out really slowly, so I had both Abby and Emmett doing it. It's not something that I think we'll do anything with for the older two, and I knew that when I downloaded it. But it might be nice to have eventually...

Ellie is finally starting to show a bit of interest in playing with the iPod touches/iPhones around here. For a long time, she wasn't interested at all...she just wanted to play the music. (I promise her hair gets done just about daily. I just never seem to capture it when the moment arises.)

While I was lucky enough to get the rods this week, Daddy was really lucky--he got an iPad2! Of course, Ellie now thinks it's hers (just like everything else in our house).

Dan and I both feel that the iPad will be helpful with school, for adults and children alike! Here they are facetiming Grandma and Grandpa.

Now we can check out all those neat iPad learning apps we hear awesome things about!