Week 4

Last week we took a break and went back to Illinois for my little sister's wedding.  The kids had fun swimming, playing, and spending time with their cousins.  This past week, we dove back into our regular schoolwork.  This next little "session" (if you will) of school will be one of our longest at 9 weeks.

We're missing any updates of Hyrum because what he usually does during the day is what you'd expect from any toddler: he builds with blocks, he throws things, he eats crayons, potties on the floor, and steals any electronic device he can get his hands on.

Preschool

Letter Themes

Our letter this week was B.  We used balls with black, blue and brown paint to bounce all over our two Bs. When they dried, we stuck them together to make butterflies!  Ellie still is not very sure about all this paint business.  LOL

PreK Activity Book

This week was a mish-mash of a few things.  On one page, there were two faces missing a few features.  The first one was missing his eyes and she got that right away.  After placing the stickers on, she looked confused about what else would be missing.  Finally, Emmett prompted her that he was missing his hair.  Ellie said, "No he's not, he's just like my daddy!"  LOL  The next picture was missing her mouth.  She could not figure out what was missing, though.  I kept trying to prompt her to feel her face.  She noted eyes, cheeks, chin, eyebrows, ears, hair, eyelashes, etc. but not mouth for whatever reason.  Then, I asked her what was on her face.  She said, "frosting" (we had had donuts that morning).  LOL  So then I asked her what was below her nose.  "Umm...boogers?"  Hahaha.  Finally, she realized that there was no mouth and she was so annoyed that HOW DARE THEY FORGET THAT?!

The book also worked on name recognition.  She can now tell me, a letter at a time, how to spell her name.  She could recite it for a while, but now she knows what it means.  In fact, one day she was telling me the letters like so, "Big E.  L.  Another L!  Uhhmmmm.... dot letter.  [I] And a little e!"

She is very pleased that she can now write her own big letter E.  Obviously we need to work on her utensil grip, but she's only three!

Junior K

Reading Lessons

Emmett is very impatient that Funnix is so methodical.  This week, we tried moving to every other lesson, which was much less annoying for him.  He completed through lesson 77.  Obviously, every other lesson won't work if the story at the end is broken into parts, but that's okay.

Math

Emmett's slowed down a bit in the math department.  He understands adding and addition, but because he's so young, we're kind of parking it until he gets a really good grip with his number bonds/addition facts to ten. He's got his doubles down, he knows the 1s and the 0s.  This only really leaves a few.  Really, though, before he moves on, I would like him to be solid in the number bonds of ten.  He knows half of them, so we've been playing games to solidify the rest.

Handwriting - New!

Emmett has started experimenting with writing letters, so I've started slowly introducing him to handwriting.  His pencil grip is really quite amazing for a four-year-old boy!  He has a proper tripod grip (whereas Abby's has become something of a quadropod grip).

First Grade

Language Arts

Grammar

We worked through most of the lessons on pronouns.  Abby only struggled memorizing one string of pronouns: him, her, he, she, it, his, hers, its.  It's a lot of random words for a six-year-old.  And the book didn't say they HAD to be memorized, so I'm good with just being really familiar with it.

Writing

Writing With Ease focused on Alice in Wonderland this week.  The first narration wasn't difficult for Abby, but the second was rather confusing since she really doesn't know what a court or jury or anything similar is.

Phonics turned to Reading to Mom

Abby's completed her phonics review, so we'll be moving on to oral reading from McGuffey's Readers.  I flipped through a few (because they're free on the public domain) and realized that, while she could do the fourth reader, the third is probably less frustrating for her at this point.  And, according to what I've read, via Lexile analyzer McGuffey's Third Eclectic Reader is about a 5th-6th grade level.  So, we'll stay there where the content might a bit more appropriate.

Reading

Abby read the first few chapter in a Boxcar Children book this week.  I don't think she'll finish it, though, as she didn't particularly care for it.

Spelling

We finished the step in AAS that begins teaching syllable division.  She reviewed (because this is still review) that we can break words up into smaller words or we can find the vowels and if their is one consonant, it usually goes with the second syllable.  She was quick to remind me that if there are two, we split between them.  That's part of the NEXT step.

Handwriting

Hah!  I got much better about keeping up with this.  We are doing shorter steps, but more frequent work.  Unfortunately, I only get better towards the end of the week, so we still only completed the letter D.  Hopefully next week we will be able to complete three letters or close to it.

Math

Abby's basically finished the first half of MEP y2.  The only frustration for her has come when MEP is trying to introduce a topic.  MEP is a spiral curriculum, so it introduces a topic or method that is supposed to be done completely with help and with the teacher.  It's kind of like a little peek into what's coming.  This causes Abby to FREAK OUT because she does not know how to do it and she thinks she should be able to complete the problem RIGHT THEN.  Instead, the curriculum fully intends the children to take a little nibble, let it percolate in the back of their mind, and then it comes back to it at a later date.

Regardless, because Abby's completed a semester in MEP (and rather early at that), I've order Singapore 2a and we'll take a few weeks working through that.  I find that Singapore and MEP complement each other nicely.  When Abby gets frustrated with one, we move back to the other and so on.  Until Singapore comes in, we've just been setting a timer and working nicely through some Miquon.  Abby calls this "fun" math and often completes three or four sheets in half an hour.

All Together

Science

This week we learned about our respiratory system.  Emmett amazes me with the love he has for science.  He does not want to miss any lesson.  And he retains!  It was actually amazing to me that he could tell me all the four parts of blood even AFTER we took a week off!  Of course, Abby loves science too, so that helps.  They just see it as a bunch of fun and games.  And, because the older kids love science, Ellie has decided it's all neato too and kept complaining until I made her her own book.

The first part of this week, we did a lab to compare our respiratory rates after different activities.  Then, we compared our respiratory rate chart with our heart rate chart.

On Thursday, the kids pretended that they were a giant's red blood cells and took oxygen (red M&Ms) through the respiratory system and exchanged them for carbon dioxide at the giant's foot (blue M&Ms).

Of course, this required Ellie to sort the M&Ms by color first...

History

While we were gone for the week, we left our clay tablets and scroll out in the yard.  By the time we got back, the scroll was kind of worse for wear.  Most of the paint had run because it had rained while we were gone.  In order to stimulate the dry conditions of being in the dessert for hundreds of years, we put both the clay table and the scroll in the oven at a low temp.  This little exercise sure did make the differences real to the kids.  The scroll was pretty beat up, but Abby's tablet survived and she's chosen to hang it from her bed post.

This week we read from chapter four, which talked about mummies and pyramids.  We watched this video on YouTube, which was really a good spoof.  We made the Great Pyramid out of blocks.  And, of course, we began the process of making our own chicken mummy.  The kids were all ecstatic about this and, of course, it became a family project.  We've named our mummy "King Cluck."

Week 3

We are on vacation next week for my sister's wedding!  Yeah!

Preschool

Letter Themes

This week's letter was I.  We used ice to paint (frozen, watered-down tempera paints).  She loved the painting part, but did not love that it left her hand all dirty... Ellie does not like to have dirty hands.  (Remember this post?  Hahaha!)

PreK Activity Book

This week we introduced the story of the Goldilocks and the Three Bears.  We've read it before, but it's always fun when "schoolwork" involves a story!  We read it, she retold it (with figures), we made porridge, Daddy read it to her, then she played it on the iPad even!

Junior K

Reading Lessons

Emmett finished up to lesson 70 this week.  He also read a fair amount of Cat in the Hat with me one day.  I printed out a phonics concentration game that he loved playing.  Our rules were a bit different: If you could sound out the word correctly, you earned a hot cheeto. If the word was a real word, you got to keep the cards and go again.  Emmett LOVED it.  Even if the word wasn't real, he'd still say, "But I get a hot cheeto!" Then I'd sound out a nonsense word and he'd say, "You don't get the cards, but you get a hot cheeto!"  It was every bit as neat for him as if he had made all the matches with real words and I had lost every turn.

Math

Emmett's now moving through the pages of Miquon Orange where addition and subtraction problems are on the same page.  Soon I'll have to buy the workbooks for Singapore Level 1.

First Grade

Language Arts

Grammar

Abby has the Months poem completely memorized.  We worked through three lessons and have finally finished the sections on nouns (hallelujah!) and have moved on to pronouns.

Writing

This week's focus was Rumpelstiltzkin.  Abby had a few days where she couldn't focus on anything, so some of her narration this week was harder than typical.  Usually she flies through these types of exercises.

Phonics

Abby is at the very end of her review of Webster's Speller.  She is confidently reading sixth and seventh grade words.  She still tries to guess an entire word sometimes, but when I require her to slow down and do the words a syllable (and sometimes even a sound) at a time, she's more than capable of decoding them.

Reading

Abby finished Mummies in the Morning and then moved on to Pirates Past Noon and finished that one as well!  It's obvious these Magic Tree House books are too easy since she finishes them in one night.  But at least she enjoys them!  For our trip next week, she's picked a Box Car Children book.

Spelling

We completed the first set of multisyllable words in spelling.  She made two errors on Friday, so she'll have review words.  The first error was starting "contest" with a K and the second one was replacing an i with an e.  Like I said, she had a few days with her head in the clouds, so I wonder if these errors were part of that...

Handwriting

We worked through the letter C in New American Cursive.

Math

It was painfully obvious that the math in the section of MEP we were in was too easy.  So, I took a look at the scope and sequence and moved her along a whole four weeks or so.  Still, the work was bordering on too easy.  The only issue we had with math was the same she had the rest of the week.  I think Abby's just looking forward to vacation next week...or something!

All Together

Science

Because we're planning on breaking this coming week, I didn't want to stop our science studies in the middle of a unit.  So, we did three sections of science this week, which allowed us to pause right before we dive into studying the respiratory system.

We studied how our muscles work with a working model that illustrates that our muscles only pull.  I caught Abby sharing that information with her Sunday School teacher later on, so it definitely settled in her brain.

From there, we moved on to discuss how our heart is a very important muscle that pushes blood through our bodies.  We learned that the more oxygen and food our muscles need, the faster our heart pumps.  The kids did different exercises and we monitored their heart rate to illustrate this.  (Can I just say how extremely difficult it is to measure a kid's heart rate while he's squirming around and two other kids are yakking at you at the same time?!)  It was painfully obvious that Abby does not correctly do push-ups since her heart rate for that exercise was the same as her resting heart rate... But, look at Emmett's form!

Finally, we made a working model of blood and illustrated the parts of our blood and why it appears to be red.  We watched a Magic School Bus episode (Inside Ralphie) that was a great introduction to this topic.  Even Emmett can now tell us the four major parts of our blood.

History

We started our week by completing our project from last week.  We made a working model of the Nile River.  When we made it, before we poured the water in, Abby started jumping up and down talking about how we should flood the Nile so there would be crops going on the side "like it really happened!"  This afternoon, she noticed that there is indeed some seed growing and she and Emmett pranced around for fifteen minutes exclaiming that they were just like Egyptian gods for making the Nile flood.

There was only one section in chapter three, which is a good thing because we wanted to do all of the activities surrounding it.  It was on the first writing and comparing the cuneiform of Sumer and the hieroglyphs of ancient Egypt.  

We first made a scroll for our hieroglyphs.  We used paper from our easel.  Abby told me we should have used papyrus to make it more realistic.  

Then, we used oven-bake clay to carve our own messages in cuneiform.

We put them outside to brave the elements while we're gone for this next week.  When we get back, we'll simulate the conditions of leaving these items in the desert for several hundreds of years by placing them in the oven on low heat.

2012-2013 Curriculum

We are currently following a classical education model.  

First Grade

Abby is six.  She is eager to learn and remembers things well.  She's reading somewhere between a sixth and seventh grade level, working a year ahead in math, and is really excited to start history and science this year.

Language Arts:  

Writing With Ease, All About Spelling (finish up level 2, maybe begin level 3), First Language Lessons (finish level 1, move into level 2), review phonics via Webster's Speller (first few weeks), good books

Math:

MEP Math Y2, Singapore Primary Math Y2, Miquon Green and Blue

Science: 

REAL Science Odyssey: Life, good books

History:

Story of the World: Ancients with Activity Guide, good books

Music and Art: 

Listening to good classical music (Classical Kids should help here!), Art with a Purpose

Junior Kindergarten

My goal for Emmett this year is to get him reading fluently.  From there, we'll add in curriculum as necessary or he demands.  He tags along with history and science and loves those activities.

Language Arts:

Funnix Beginning Reading, maybe he'll start AAS level 1 in a few months, good books

Math:

Miquon Orange, maybe we'll move him into MEP and/or Singapore y1 

Preschool

Ellie is the child that demands to do her own reading and her own math.  She has activities this year because she loves them.

Letter Crafts:

These will be activities that I cull from all over the place.  We'll focus on a letter a week and watch a lot of LeapFrog Letter Factory.

Activity Book:

Ellie will also work through the What Your Preschooler Needs to Know workbook that goes along with the book.  It's very open-and-go and she often begs to do more.  

Tot School

My goal for Hyrum this year is just enjoy the time with him.  He will tag along with what everyone else does and make messes, color on the walls, potty on the floor, and spill his snacks...which is exactly what I expect a toddler to do!

Week 2

Things are really starting to get going pretty smoothly!

Preschool

Letter Themes

This week we worked on remembering the letter "L."  We went on an L hunt one day that had Ellie shouting, "L!  Look!  L!  Hey!  L is for look!"

We made ladders out of our Ls.

 

PreK Activity Book

This week focused on the color red, which was a good review for Ellie.  Every once in a while she mixes red up with green still.    It also worked with her on recognizing her name in print.  I think after we complete "I" next week, we will make a name bug for her.

Junior K

Reading Lessons

Emmett doesn't seem to struggle at all with what is expected of him in reading.  He doesn't necessarily love the lessons, but does them pretty well.  I would imagine we will see a big jump with him reading early readers here in the next few weeks.

Math

Emmett has most of his math facts to ten memorized.  This has definitely caught me by surprise!  The ones he doesn't know with confidence are the facts that aren't +1s, doubles, or near doubles.  So, he doesn't remember 5+3, 6+3, 4+2, and a few others.  I'm more than happy to let him continue to use the rods until he's really solid with these.

I introduced him to the idea of number bonds earlier this week.  From there, I moved him into figuring missing addend problems which he had no problem with.  Then, I introduced him to subtraction.  At first he was adding the subtrahend and the minuend, but he's doing it properly now.  We talked extensively how adding is putting things together and subtracting is breaking apart.  He really seems to get it from that discussion.  Now looking at a number bond, he can tell me the addition sentences and at least one subtraction sentence for the bond.

First Grade

Language Arts

Grammar

We sort of slacked here this week.  I need to print off "Monday's Child" and review it plentiful with Abby.  We still reviewed proper and common nouns, which went fine.  We're ahead in this book, so I'm not too worried about having had a lax week here.

Writing

Not much to report here.  She did two days of copywork and two days of narration focusing around Pinocchio.

Reading

Abby began Lulu and the Brontosaurus this week.  She seemed to really enjoy the book.  She and I are also buddy-reading Mummies in the Morning to go along with our history studies.

Phonics

Nothing introduced here is new, but some of the word-reading is good review.  She has a tendency to glance at the whole word and either panic or guess, even though she knows her phonics.

Handwriting

Abby really struggled with the cursive b this week.  If there was one thing we could change about New American Cursive, it would be introducing the letters in a more systematic way.  In some ways I was thinking I'd change the order of introduction, but in other ways, I do want her to get good at the bs because they are a part of her name.  Regardless, she really seemed to get it this week.

Spelling

We're taking spelling slowly since we're also still reviewing phonics.  This week, we reviewed step 3 which deals with using why to end short words that end in the long i sound.  

Math

MEP is still fairly easy for her.  She completes the lessons within an allotted amount of time (40 minutes) and usually without complaint.  On Friday, she chose some Miquon sheets to work.  The sheets she chose asked her to divide eight snowmen into halves, fourths and eighths and draw certain things on them.  I wasn't sure if she would understand it, but that was all for naught.  She wanted to complete the entire little booklet and enjoyed her fraction work.  This is where Miquon really shines because it takes things that most people shy away from teaching first-graders and allows it to be attainable (and fun!) at these young ages.

All Together

Science

We learned that all living things are made of cells and discussed the differences between animal cells and plants cells.  We read a few books about cells and made our own (simplified) edible cells.

After cells, we moved right to talking about skeletons and bones.  We have a few fun books from the library and we constructed a skeleton and talked about important bones and their names.

A little bit later, we played bone Simon Says and also watched a youTube video singing a bone song.

History

This week we began talking about ancient Egypt.  We learned about the Nile flooding, upper and lower Egypt, and we learned the myth of Osiris and Set.  The kids did some mapwork that showed the Nile River, the Nile Delta, and Upper and Lower Egypt.  We were planning to make our working Nile River model this weekend, but I forgot potting soil.  I think we'll be doing that tomorrow afternoon...