Week 20

PreK:

Emmett worked a bit through his workbook, enjoyed riding his bike, and played with our rods some. His favorite game was when I made pictures for the base ten flats and put them on the flats for "buildings." He made a road with the rods and pretended he had a doctor who got in his car at his house, drove to the hospital and then went to McDonald's for lunch.

He's actually surprised me with knowing a select few addition facts.

Math:

We're still working through MEP 1B with Abby. There wasn't a meltdown at all this week. One day took forever, but the rest only took somewhere around 15-20 minutes. What changed? I set an hour for math and told her if she finished early she could play on the iPad. Her motivation sure did change!

MEP 1 focuses on the building of certain numbers at a time. This week the focus was on eleven.

She's not counting on her fingers, she's just excited that she built 11!

Thursday's lesson had her working problems like 20-8-?=11 and 15-?+3=7. At first she panicked, but when I told her she could use a number line, she was able to complete them with no problem.

She completed week 22 without any issue.

Reading:

I ordered Sonlight's Reading Schedule to give us a bit of direction in our reading. When I gave Abby the placement test, she placed into grade 4-5 readers.

For the last little bit, we've required her to read to us without any real direction. And while she enjoys reading, there is lots of why-do-I-have-tos when we asked her to read aloud. I know she enjoys it (she reads in her bed for about 45 min at night)... In light of this, and because she's only 5, I chose to start with the grade 2 readers. Though, we did jump into the grade 2 ones about halfway through with Owl At Home. The first day we had a bit of resistance, but when she realized I was asking her to read aloud easy books to me, she became a lot more agreeable. Last night she told me her favorite part of the day was reading to me. And no, I'm not worried about the readers being too easy because they'll ramp up soon enough. And like I said, she's only five.

For read-aloud, I began reading the Boxcar Children to her right before bed. She's enjoying the extra time that she's allowed to stay up to listen to the story.

Emmett is a bit more difficult to read aloud to. He constantly moves, zones out, and has a hard time imagining...or something. When we talk with him about the story, he is not able to remember as much as one would expect. Because of those things, we've decided to focus on reading Emmett things that he would like rather than things that we think most of the children would be okay with. We think maybe he is just enduring storytime sometimes. So Daddy's been reading Dragonology and the Dragonology Handbook to him and he has been loving that.

Science:

We continued our unit on magnets this week and focused on the poles of a magnet. We made them float, we pushed a car without touching it, and we felt the push of two north poles trying to touch.

Geography:

We moved on to Africa this week and learned about the pyramids and the the Nile. We learned about different animals in Africa (elephant, lion, giraffe, camel, etc). Abby was fascinated with the pyramids and mummies. When I opened our DK Eyewitness book on Mummies and looked through some of the pages she seemed grotesquely fascinated. I was expecting that response. She also seemed a little scared and looked up at me and said, "Mummies don't come back to life, do they?" LOL Someone's been watching a bit too much Scooby Doo.

Extra:

• I've been slowly sorting through what things we'll be using with first grade and wondering how I'm going to not go insane when we add in a few more pieces of curricula. I'm also excited to start certain ones. After seeing Abby's fascination with mummies and some Ancient Egypt things, I'm excited to see how she reacts to Story of the World. I will also admit to being slightly nerdy and enjoying history and being excited just because I like the subject. LOL Because I'm trying to get my ducks in a row, though, I decided it was time to layer on some more responsibility for the two-year-old. So, this week, Ellie got her very own chore board.

• We also visited the zoo this week. It was busy because the zoo was packed and free (our zoo is free on Mondays in January and February). We got there about feeding time and saw this awesome snake with his food in his tank. We were hoping to watch him eat it, but the kids were too distracting to him.

• This coming Monday is our 100th day of school! Daddy is taking the day off and we are going to have a party. The kids are pumped!