Week of 14 Aug -- Last Week of Summer!

We were really fairly light this week! This week I finished up the last little bit of arranging to start school (as in our full load) this coming Monday. That involved just time-consuming things that I've put off for a while (tearing apart our AAS cards, printing out and putting together a "counting" book to go with Miquon, laminating some of our daily calendar stuff, etc). Mostly we played and did FIAR, which is really how summer should be.

ABCs:

We reviewed the letter S this week.

Math:

We did pull out the rods and played with them a bit. Most notably, I printed off some centimeter graph paper and we drew shapes and had each other find rods to fit their shapes. At the end, we actually built our stairs and checked to see how many squares it took to fill each one. This is the first time I've acknowledged the idea that each rod could be a different number (ie yellow is 5, therefore orange is 10).

On the other hand, I have heard Abby refer to certain rod colors by the correct numbers if the white rod is our one rod. When we clean up the rods, we try to "stump" each other by producing one rod and seeing if the other can find two rods to match the one rod. The other day, we were building with them and I pulled out a dark green rod. From there she said, "That's easy. White and five!" And she pulled out a white rod and a yellow rod.

Five in a Row:

We rowed When I Was Young in the Mountains this week.

Social Studies: We discussed which mountains the author was young in. My parents actually live at the foothills of the Appalachians. Abby chose, however, to place our picture right in West Virginia. We also discussed a bit of historical things--the big one being a johnny house.

Language Arts: We revisited repetition this week. Nearly every page begins with "When I was young in the mountains..." Abby wrote her own story which repeated "When I was young in Oklahoma..."

Applied math: We discussed scales and balance and weights. For this we looked at the scales at the grocery store, used my postal scale to weigh small things and even pulled out our brand new math balance!

Art: We discussed how pictures can give us clues and made a list from one of the pictures in the book.

Science: Abby loved this one! We talked about snakes! We discussed what venom is, found pictures of different venemous snakes in our country, we even watched a snake eat a mouse whole! The venemous conversation translated to life when we found a venemous spider--a black widow!--in our back yard!

Read-Aloud:

We finished Charlie and the Chocolate Factory! Abby was ecstatic to hear that there is another book about Charlie. She's decided we can read that one next and Harry Potter can wait until later.

This evening we had a Wonka celebration! We watched the classic Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory and enjoyed Wonka candy. The afternoon we picked out our candy, Abby was on the phone with Grandma when she exclaimed, "And we found Wonka candy at WalMart! It came straight from Wonka's Factory!!!!" She was so excited and could hardly wait the few days until we had our movie night. She said her favorite candy was the Chocolate Waterfall bar. She would also exclaim periodically, "That's not what happened in the book!" or "His boat wasn't blue, it was pink!" LOL At the end of the movie, her grandparent's called and asked what she thought. Abby said, "Well, it was pretty good, but the book was much better." Hahaha.

Life:

We noticed this week that the watermelons that Abby planted with my mom are growing. She had to call up my mom right away and facetimed her to show her.

We also made bubble snakes where Abby, Emmett and I discussed the differences between blow and suck.

Unfortunately, Emmett is one of those kids who has to figure it out for himself why I tell him not to do something.