Week 25

Besides formal work, the kids did a lot of BrainPOP Jr. and playing outside with our awesome weather. In fact, Wednesday was so beautiful, we only did a bit of math work and shelved all of our stuff in favor of visiting two different parks. When you have mid-70s in February, you have to drop some things and just enjoy the beauty of the weather!

PreK:

Emmett did a bit of Reading Eggs this week...that was it. :) He has asked for a few reading lessons, so I think I should probably get on that...even if it I know it won't last long.

Math:

Abby worked through week 27 in MEP 1B. This week was a review of number bonds up to 15. She is really reaching a place where figuring these sums and differences is automatic. I'm loving where Abby is with MEP and how it is teaching her complex reasoning while keeping those numbers low.

For warm-up math, she did a lot of Math Bingo. She likes level 1, which contains number bonds through ten. I require her to use level 2 which requires addition with one- and two-digit numbers without regrouping if the number is past 20. At one point we worked with level 3. She did just fine with that level, but there were a few problems where I had to write down the two numbers and break them into tens and ones for her to add up. (IE: 18 + 24 = 10 + 8 + 20 +4 = 30 + 10 + 2 = 42) That was more than she wanted to do during the course of playing an iPad game, so I happily let her go back to level 2.

Language Arts:

We are still working with common and proper nouns in grammar. Abby was a bit confused by the word common in this instance (which is actually quite funny considering her using the word sibling vs sister a few weeks ago).

We moved into Step 2 in AAS2. Because we're already ahead, I don't want to zoom through this level. So, we're only working with spelling twice a week or so. It would be expensive to allow her to work through this faster than that. :) So, this week, she learned that English words very rarely end in the long i sound. Instead, we use the letter y at the end of words that end in the long i.

Cursive is going okay for her. This week she worked on the letters f, r, and c. She picked up c very easily, but f and r were rather difficult for her. It's a work in progress.

Abby read me Amelia Bedelia and absolutely loved it this week. We've had a compilation of Amelia Bedelia books, but she's never picked it up. She thought it was hilarious and zoomed through three days' worth of reading in one day.

Geography:

This was our last week of our continent study and we finished it up with Australia. It was a good little unit that hopefully gave us some awareness of the unique things in each continent.