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...