Week 3

Daddy was off this week! We maintained our basics, but skipped FIAR to do a light unit study on fire safety.

ABCs:

This week's letter was Y.

PreK:

We read the Goldilocks and the 3 Bears and sequenced the story. I am loving the activity book that goes with What Your Preschooler Needs to Know! It comes with all of the stickers and cutouts you could need. For Goldilocks, there were cutouts of the bears' porridge bowls, the chairs, and the beds. We added magnets to the back and they are now at home on our dishwasher. We have a Goldilocks figurine and Emmett will tell the whole Goldilocks story.

We also did a section on faces and placed stickers of eyes, ears, and noses where they belonged.

We've also spent hours this week at certain parks bike-riding. Emmett loves it and asks us every day if he can go ride his bike.

Reading:

We read a fair amount of picture books this week, but none from Charlie. Having Daddy home sure does throw off our routine! Abby did some reading to us as well.

Spelling:

I'm kind of at an impasse as to how long our spelling lessons should take. The lessons still contain fairly easy words for Abby. We completed step 11 in two days, we made a spelling notebook on a separate day. We were supposed to do spelling on Friday, but it didn't happen. We'll pick it back up this week.

Math:

Daddy actually did a bit of rod play with Emmett this week. He and I also played war. He loves playing war with me because he typically wins. :)

We finished the "Literal Work with Rods" section in Gattegno Mathematics. From there we worked a bit with the number application and have now moved back to the Miquon lab sheets. We've only done the first two in section C (which is addition), but it was fairly quick and painless for Abby.

Finding the difference:

Making the pattern of five:

Because we started a new "unit" in her math stuff, we are taking the advantage to try this out. Each time she completes a worksheet, she uses the fun paper puncher to punch out a shape. Then we stick the shape on a piece of paper. The shapes missing out of the corner allows me to see quickly which sheets have been completed and I'm hoping the shapes on the paper give Abby a sense of accomplishment.

Abby also likes to add a bit of fun to her math. In this step, I asked her to find if the math sentence was true. I told her to draw a smiley face if it was, she chose to draw a cat smiley face.

Unit Study:

With Daddy home, we took a bit of break from Five in a Row and talked about fire safety. We discussed fire extinguishers, firefighters, smoke alarms, important things to know in an emergency, etc.

We own the book No Dragons for Tea, which is an awesome introduction to fire safety for kids. We also rented Billy Blue Hair - Why are Fire Trucks Red? and the kids got to watch it as a free show (as in, they didn't have to pay out to get to watch it).

We visited the Oklahoma State Firefighter's Museum.

We tested our fire alarm and ran a fire drill. We let the kids crawl out of their windows as an illustration of an alternate route out of their bedroom. They had a blast with that!

We camped out and had our own little fire to cook hot dogs and s'mores. (This led to "tent schooling" the next day!)

We discussed stop, drop and roll and practiced it by rolling down a hill.

We reminded the kids of our family meeting spot.

Emmett has really enjoyed this unit study. When asked what he wants to be when he grows up, he immediately replies, "A firefighter!" On Monday, we'll be visiting the Oklahoma City Fire Department and touring their station!

Memory Work:

We memorized our personal information for part of our fire safety unit!

Calendar Time:

Monday through Thursday we do a "What's the Word?" moment where I introduce a new word. (I've been using Evan-Moor's First Grade A Word A Day for the lists.) I've made a word search every three weeks to review our new words. Abby remembered what each meant and would say it as she found it on the search. She is beginning to really like word searches.

Life:

We got a new kitty yesterday! He is still very much a kitten (3 mos). He's been very skittish, but is slowly warming up to us. Our other cat, Drift, is still asserting his dominance over the kitten, but the kids already love Swirl!

And Hyrum just gets cuter day by day!