Week 11

ABCs:

We typically do our weekly letter on Friday. Well, this week it didn't even pass into my thought...so we skipped it unintentionally this week. We only have two letters to finish up our alphabet, though!

Math:

Abby moved into the section on numbers larger than ten. We have occasionally called numbers such as 18 "one-ten-eight" or 26 "two-tens-six-units" so the idea that 12 was a "ten and a two" was not foreign to her.

We made it as far as introducing the idea of making a ten to solve addition problems with a sum over ten. The first day I introduced it, it was obviously a new concept and I could see her mind stretching as she tried to grasp the idea. The next day, it was fine and she could figure out how to complete such problems without prompting. We still have stopped here and will play with the idea for a bit while she completes some sheets in her Miquon book. Luckily, some of these sheets go over the exact same "make ten" concept.

She has been fascinated with the concept of odd or even, so one day I had her figure out what each number was and Emmett scribed an "O" or "E" on our number line. By the time he got to 4 or 5, Emmett would shout out the answer at each number too.

Emmett has been very interested in math of late, including proclaiming things like "3 and 3 makes 6!" or "1 and 2 is 3!" or "if Abby has 5, I have 2, and Ellie has 1, how many do we have altogether?" So, I've started him with some very basic Miquon-esque activities. The whole point of these is to really familiarize him with the rods.

And while they are our main manipulative, every once in a while, Abby still feels the whim to build something with the rods. This is her "royal bridge."

Spelling:

Abby is doing very well with AAS1 and is fairly good with remembering the rules that she has learned. We are parking it for a portion, though, because she has a hard time hearing the difference between the /nk/ sounds and /ck/. This week we spelled a lot of our review words, but did not get to the next lesson, which is on plural words.

Reading:

Abby picked up Yertle the Turtle at the library on Tuesday. It's been good to have her read to me because it is slightly easy for her still (though, the Book Wizard has it at a 3.8 reading level?), has some nonsense words to discourage guessing (what Dr. Seuss book does not? :)) and still interests her.

We are continuing on with me reading Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle aloud. We just finished the Selfishness Cure and are coming up on the Radish Cure, which is one of my favorites.

We are still working on some pre-blending/phonemic awareness activities with Emmett. In all reality, there isn't much I can do with him in this area besides read a lot to him. He knows all of his letter sounds, but is developmentally not ready to blend words. We talk about what words begin or end with, what rhymes, play "Say it Fast" and other things.

Unit Study:

We kept up with How to Make a Cherry Pie, but somehow I got so busy teaching that I forgot to take photos. We did the Pledge of Allegiance everyday, talked about the National Anthem and listened to it fairly regularly. We watched episodes of Liberty's Kids. Next week, we will be jumping back in with FIAR.