Week 8

Daddy is finally feeling better to the point that we are out and about more frequently.  We still got all of our school work completed this week, even though we took a day at the fair and had other adventures out.

Preschool

Letter Themes

Ellie wasn't very interested in doing her letter craft this week, so we didn't push it.

PreK Activity Book

She made up for her lack of interest in crafting by completing last week AND this week in her book.  I guess now she's "caught up" (even though I didn't really feel as though she was "behind").

Junior K

Reading

Emmett's moved into reading real books.  We began the Cat in the Hat this week, popcorn style.  He didn't finish it, though.  Next week, I guess.

Math

He's still counting things.  We're just going to work on correctly counting with math names rather than worry about English varieties right nwo.

Handwriting

We worked on forming ms with the correct size when compared to his capital E.

First Grade

Language Arts

Grammar

We hit a section in First Language Lessons where Abby is reviewing a lot of previous memory work and ideas.  I'm pleased with Abby's retention so far.

Reading

We are still working through Stuart Little.

Spelling

We began the next step in AAS that introduces the idea that the long sound of U in VCE words sounds less like "U" and more like "ooo."  She also learned one word that is spelled with a z at the end of the word: size.

Handwriting

Cursive is usually the first thing to drop if we get busy. I think we got some review writing done, but that's it.

Math

We worked with place value and started the section on renaming.  It seems that since Abby is familiar with renaming ten ones as one ten, she has applied the same concept to ten tens as one hundred and ten hundreds as one thousand.  This next section shouldn't be too rough except that we will be introducing the vertical representation of adding with renaming.  She does get stuck with doing things just one way.  I guess we'll see...

All Together

Science

We finished up the section on genetics with a lab on fingerprints.  The curriculum told us to draw a dark mark on a paper with a pencil and then rub our fingers on the graphite and pull the fingerprint off with tape.  I'm glad we followed that instead of doing a stamp pad because it was very easy to see the characteristics of each fingerprint.

Genetics was the completion of our study of the human body. So, we moved on to the next section which illustrated the difficulties scientists might have in classifying animals into different groups.  This activity was a little harder for the kids to grasp until I started drawing the chart on our big sliding door.

History

This week we read about ancient China.  For our project, we created our own Ming Dynasty plates.  We grabbed some plates from the dollar store, then used specialized blue paint to paint on them and fired them in the oven.

We even took the plates to Panda Express to eat "Chinese food" (or the closest the kids will eat) on our plates.