Week 21

PreK:

Emmett didn't do much formal this week. He enjoyed tagging along where he wanted to, but mostly played with Ellie while Abby did her thing. I did get him playing with some C rods a bit.

Math:

We worked through Week 23 of MEP 1B. Our focus number was twelve this week. Abby was off this week, though, and we had lots of resistance.

You can sort of see her daydreaming a bit here:

So, each day we quickly worked through our MEP 1B sheet and then jumped into some Miquon. Miquon is a lot more fun for her right now.

I do want her to continue to work through the MEP because there is so much practice and problem-solving in those lessons. I think she's just getting bored with the focusing on just one number. I am getting to a point where I'm starting to believe that she is telling me it's "too hard" and she "can't do it" not because she can't, but because she doesn't WANT to. I think it is her way of asking for a challenge. At first that seemed counterintuitive. Why would she tell me it was too hard if she is ready to move on? But the more I evaluate, the more I realize she is more capable of doing things she struggled with a bit ago. A few weeks ago, she was struggling to get through the process of adding past ten. This week I realized that she doesn't know those facts off the top of her head, but she can figure them without a problem. Soon, they will become rote.

Besides...when in math do you get to build little sheep pens with your manips?

Spelling:

We reviewed some words from AAS 1. She still is retaining the rules that she learned. We will work through How to Spell Simultaneously with AAS 2 (I think) until I decide which we want to continue with. Which means...I need to order AAS 2.

Reading:

Abby completed week 23 in Sonlight's grade 2 readers this week, which means she read Frog and Toad are Friends. These books are still really easy for her, which is fine as they are confidence building. She does not like to sound words out at all and gets frustrated when she doesn't know a word right away. For as much as she loves to be read to, you think she'd love reading. She does, to a degree, but it is very frustrating for her because she wants to know every word at first glance.

On her free time, she read several different books in our library box, including books with a reading level as high as 4.9. When compared to this, it's painfully obvious that grade 2 readers are a easy for her. But sometimes it's nice to have "work" be easy.

We finished up The Boxcar Children this week and have moved on to Mr. Popper's Penguins. We've done this one before, but we're reading it again so we can watch the movie for movie night.

Science:

I was planning on finishing up our magnetism mini-unit this week, but that didn't happen. Whoops! We'll move it on down to next wek.

Geography:

We discussed North America this week. We discussed the Grand Canyon, the Great Lakes and the Panama Canal. Of course, we also talked about animals native to this region.

When we do these studies, we listen to the Teacher and the Rockbots song called "Continents." Abby loves it because we dance around and it ties in quite nicely to the continent of the week.

Extra:

• Our weather has been chilly here, but despite that we took the kids to ride their bikes this last week. Abby has been running around with Emmett's old balance bike and the improvement has been remarkable. Her confidence is soaring this way.

• Monday was our 100th day of school! We celebrated quite well. Daddy took the day off, we had friends over, ordered pizza, made 100-day hats and even went to the movies! It was quite the party!

• On Fridays, I try to let the kids do a fun craft/art project that is completely geared toward the process. This week, we did stamps and everyone loved it.

• We also got Life of Fred this week. We're going to work slowly through the first book, but Abby already loves it. She thinks it's silly and definitely fun. We even made her her own "turn to play" book.