Week 16

Even though this week was Thanksgiving week, we still did schoolwork...though a bit light/shorter than normal!

Preschool

Ellie has been having gastrointestinal issues of late.  Mostly, it's involved vomiting and random times.  I took her the doctor last week and then ran some tests.  This week, though, she had an upper GI series.  Between that and Thanksgiving prep, we took an "unschool" approach.  In our house that equals A LOT of reading to her and a ton of playing with blocks (mostly Duplo).

Junior K

Reading

Emmett skipped back and forth between I See Sam books he's already read and some Dr. Seuss (especially the Cat in the Hat's Learning Library).  He really loves science-y books and has been carrying around a book from the library with HUGE spreads of insects and spiders.  I wish they made beginning readers like that.  He'd eat it up.

We also moved back to reading some stories from 100 Easy Lessons.  He cruised through them.  Now I wonder if we should go back and work on the again for fluency.

Spelling - New!

Since Emmett has had a good amount of phonics instruction, but still isn't fluent, I debated starting him in All About Spelling 1.  I thought we'd take it slowly and learn the phonograms and see how it goes.  He really enjoyed saying the sounds and writing them with me.  We'll see how far he makes it.

Math

Skipped!

First Grade

Language

Grammar

We worked through lessons 72-75.  We worked mostly with the poem Three Little Kittens and some review of nouns, verbs and pronouns within the poem.

Writing

This week I read her Master of all Masters, which is a folktale.  I only had to re-read one section of the story, which I thought was pretty good for all of those weird words it dealt with!  The other story we worked with was an Aesop fable.  It was kind of neat because next week for history we will be learning about Ancient Greece.

We also wrote letters to Santa.  :)

Reading

Abby got on Book Adventure and took the quiz for Meet Molly.  She got all ten questions right, so apparently she did follow the story somewhat.  I'm not sure she grasped some of the significance of the story, but it was a good introduction to some ideas for her.

This week she's worked through Beezus and Ramona.  We checked it out from the library on my kindle.  There are good things and bad things about that.  I really like her using real books and turning real pages.  BUT, at the same time, she thinks it's neat to use a device to read a book.  I can also make the text larger if she needs it (though, she doesn't).  Most of all, though, she can't freak out about how big a book or chapter is.  She just gets on and reads it.  She's already two-thirds of the way through Beezus and Ramona, so I anticipate we'll be picking another book fairly soon.

Spelling

We worked through some commonly used words (to, do, you, your, of) and some words using the third sound of u.  Even though it was a short week, there wasn't much issue with these words.  It probably did help that half of the list was composed of very high frequency words.

Handwriting

We moved on to learning the letter M this week.

Math

Because it was a short week, we worked through the given review of multiplication and then used a bit of Miquon to review multi-digit addition.  I think next week, for her warm-up work (which we never really do), we'll review multi-digit subtraction.

All Together

Science

Our butterflies finally matured into adulthood!  Ellie was so excited!  We've been feeding them oranges and plan to release them this afternoon.

We also moved on and studied arachnids this week.  Abby and Emmett loved the little ditty that came in their science books about spiders. Emmett also caught a spider for us to observe.  The favorite part was also putting an ant in with the spider and then observing how the ant went missing!

History

This week we read about the Minoans.  The kids were fascinated with the stories from this week.  Who wouldn't love bull-jumping, the Minotaur and volcano exploding?!  They did have a hard time remembering the name of the civilization that lived on Crete.  We did a lot of "Who lived on Crete?" with the kids yelling, "THE MINOANS!"  LOL