Week 13

Last week was a scheduled break.  It was also Emmett's birthday.  He turned five years old!

Preschool

Letter Themes

Seeing as this was the week of Halloween, we did some Halloween stuff instead!  We read a ton of Halloween books.  One of the favorites was Go Away, Big Green Monster by Ed Emberly.  So, we made monster masks.  Ellie enjoyed this, and even Hyrum got a big kick out of putting the monster to his face and then letting out a pseudo scream.

The older three constructed their own monster faces.

PreK Activity Book

The book focused a lot on reviewing our senses and then patterns.  I was surprised that Ellie could continue AB patterns with relative ease.  Imagine that!  She loved doing it with her Halloween candy even.

Junior K

I didn't get many pictures of Emmett doing schoolwork this week.  He doesn't cooperate half the time to take a picture.  BUT, the highlight of his week (besides Halloween) was his swim class.  He's LOVING it!  He just wishes there weren't as many kids in his class because they're all bigger and he gets bowled over occasionally.  He is at least three years younger than any other kid in his class.

Reading

Emmett is continuing to work on his fluency.  This week he read books 22-26 in the I See Sam readers.  He also worked on a few other books on his spare time.

Math

He moved into numbers above 10 and number bonds.  He is a bit of a know-it-all when it comes to math.  He, of course, doesn't know it all, but he likes to think he does.  LOL

First Grade

Language

Grammar

We continued on through and finished up some work with months of the year and seasons and abbreviations.  I should accelerate Abby through this stuff, but she loves that it's easy and she is only six.

Writing

Her selection this week came from The Saturdays.  Abby really enjoyed listening to the story selections from this book.  It might be a good read-aloud in the near future.

Reading

Abby finished Ramona, the Pest!  She loved it.  To celebrate, we redeemed her next coupon for Book-It on Friday.  She went to the library and picked out her next book: Meet Molly, An American Girl.

Spelling

Abby learned "/er/ as in her," and applied that sound to words.  She that we call such a syllable an R-controlled syllable.  Now she points them out in reading.  LOL

Handwriting

We continued to work on marker/pen/pencil pressure and some cursive work.  She worked through the letters K and L and their review parts.

Math

This week was a scheduled review week.  She only missed one or two problems the entire week, which was pretty good.  She did have to review the meaning of division a time or two on Monday, though.  I guess taking a week off'll do that to you.

She's also started annotating her regrouping when she needs to hold a lot of it in her head.  She even does it for problems in the horizontal representation.

(She's moving her hand up to erase the two and change it to a one, here.)

I knew that eventually she would adapt and change how she solves problems.  That's fine with me.  As long as what she's doing is mathematically correct, she can work it however she'd like.

All Together

Science

We learned about echinoderms this week.  The kids thought it was a really interesting unit.  They thought it was wicked that a sea cucumber can spit out its intestines and asked to watch video after video of it on youtube.  LOL

History

This week we moved back to Mesopotamia with the Phoenicians.  The kids really retained the part about them making glass, especially since we watched videos of people today blowing glass.

We made our own purple dye and dyed some yarn.  No stinky snails here, please!  No way!  Instead we used kool-aid and the crock pot to dye some yarn.  When it is sufficiently dried and I have a second, I will knit it up for Abby and she will have her own hat that is the color of the kings.