Week 9

We are one-fourth through the school year!  Yay!

Preschool

Letter Themes

We did the letter J for jellyfish this week!  It went along with our science studies, and Ellie was sure she wanted to do a letter, but wasn't specific about which one.  Unfortunately, she thought it was an umbrella...LOL But at least it came out cute.

PreK Activity Book

She is back into her book and loving it.  We did the Itsy Bitsy Spider and used circle stickers this week.  The shapes and colors stuff is mostly review (except for the red/green confusion), but she still likes doing it all.

There was one section which had her drawing lines.  She has a very fist-like grip, so we tried pencil grips to help her grip the pencil correctly.  She didn't get that, so we're going to be working that by doing a lot of coloring with broken crayon pieces.

Hyrum, though, loves to draw with a pencil.  His grip is a lot better (at 16 months!) but sometimes he grips way up high.

Junior K

Reading

Emmett finished up The Cat in the Hat this week.  It has improved his fluency a little bit.  Next week I think we'll move on to Green Eggs and Ham or something similar.  He is enjoying reading real books.  He also finished his Book It chart and was happy to earn a coupon for his OWN pizza.  :)

Math

We played a few math games this week.  He liked play addition war.

Handwriting/ETC

Emmett got annoyed with me just having him form letters when I wanted.  Apparently he needs to see a means to an end.  So, I pulled out Explode the Code 1.

These are good review for him as they are just CVC words.  BUT, we will also use it to teach proper letter formation.

First Grade

Language Arts

Grammar

We completed through lesson 60 in FLL1.  We reviewed pronouns, identified action verbs, and introduced initials.

Writing

This week's narration and copywork focused around Charlotte's Web.  Abby was excited because she was familiar with the story AND because Stuart Little is written by the same author.

Reading

Abby is still cruising through Stuart Little.  She did freak out over a few words of vitamins (riboflavin, thiamine, and something hydrochloride).  I just repeated them a billion times and told them they were vitamins and minerals.  It wasn't worth the drama.  She has 19 more pages to finish the book.

Spelling

We completed step 11 which deals with vowel-consonant-e words that begin with a blend.  I wasn't sure that we were going to complete a new step this week as I didn't get to until Thursday.  But, it wasn't a huge leap for her to take all the CVE words we've been working with and then apply the blends at the beginning.

Handwriting

Abby worked on more review and Js in her handwriting book.  I should probably have her spell some of her spelling words in cursive if she's covered the letters in handwriting...

Math

Abby had a bit of excitement on Monday during math time.  She lost tooth number five while working some of her problems!

There was really no hang-up with math this week.  She was completely able to apply renaming all the way across different place value areas.  The only thing that was new this week was that Singapore introduced the vertical representation of adding three-digit numbers with "carrying" (or as Singapore calls it "renaming").  She only really saw the value of writing vertically when she had three large addends.  She did write them vertically and solve that way when asked, but otherwise she preferred to solve the problems in her head.  She had no problem applying the vertical algorithm with larger numbers either.  This seems to be a theme with Abby.  She has no problem intuiting into an area where she's not yet taught.  It's as though she inherently understands that such methods can be applied in other areas.

All Together

Science

This week we discussed cnidaria.  Emmett didn't seem to be as interested in such things, but once we got into it, he enjoyed it almost as much as the human body.

We created our own sea jelly model and discussed their life cycles.

On Friday, we visited the zoo on a hunt to SEE some cnidaria.  We didn't get to see any jellies, but we DID get to see a lot of coral and anemones.

We also introduced our kids to the beginning of our Anamalia collection.  As we go through and study different animals that represent each phylum, we will earn a stuffed buddy.  The kids have to pick a stuffed animal to donate to some less fortunate children AND eventually we'll have a whole diverse many of stuffed animals to sort into their own phyla! We'll mostly be getting beanie babies because they are small.  The kids like that they come pre-named.  This guy is Goochy.

History

This week we read the chapter on Western Africa.  The kids were fascinated the Sahara Desert wasn't always a desert.  They LOVED the Anansi stories.  Everyone colored their own picture of Anansi and Turtle.

We also played a review game that I found on the Run of the Mill Family Blog.   Before we played, I had the kids sit down with their history books and read their narrations and check over their maps.

The kids didn't really care about points, but they did enjoy answering the questions.  Abby surprised me with hardly needing to use her book and only actually not remembering the answer to one question (about silt).  We played it again, but with our Chutes and Ladders gameboard, and Abby didn't even need her book at all then.

We also changed the salt mixture in King Cluck.  He only has two weeks left in the salt.  It's amazing the transformation he's made in only a month!