Week 17

My parents were in town this week so we made our best effort to get schoolwork out of the way as quickly as possible each day.  I'm pleased to say that we had skill subjects down and finished within 60-90 minutes most days.  :)

BUT, because we were trying to quickly finish lessons, I was not as focused at taking pictures.  Therefore, this post will be picture-less.  Oh well.

Preschool

Letter Craft

Skipped this in favor of hanging out with Grandma!

PreK Activity Book

I read the Little Red Hen to Ellie and she sequenced the story.  She also worked some on drawing lines and dots.

Junior K

Language

Reading

We worked through some 100 Easy Lessons again.  Emmett is flying through these lessons that we've already done.  BUT, I have seen some improvement with fluidity.  He's now capable of looking at a word, thinking about the different parts, and blending it all together before speaking.  He can now "say it fast" if he thinks about it, without sounding out.

He has complained that the stories are long and there are no pictures, but he's not sounding nearly as many words, and if he is motivated, reading is done for him in ten minutes.  Right now this feels like a sweet spot with him.  I don't want to try and push him mostly because I know it will be pointless.  When he is developmentally ready to make that jump to automaticity, he will spurt forward again.

Spelling

He is still LOVING the idea of spelling.  We continued to review the sounds all different letters can make.  I am taking this slowly, but he is doing really well.  I also am connecting spelling a bit with his handwriting practice so he is partly dictated by how well he can form the letters.

Emmett did spell his first word this week.  Grandpa has always affectionately called him "Punk" and he even spelled it!  He looked confused about which /k/ sound to use, but after I told him that we hardly end English words in "c" he correctly chose "k."  He was pleased with himself.

Math

We worked through some simple number bond games.  I tried to keep him sums to ten, but at this age, he loves grabbing the bigger rods to see what it is.  LOL

First Grade

Language

Grammar

We worked through Lessons 76-78 which focused on some review, abbreviations in an address and titles of respect.

Writing

This week's narrations and copywork were from The Reluctant Dragon.  Abby didn't love the story, but didn't struggle with any of it either.

Reading

Abby finished up Beezus and Ramona like I expected.  She was pretty insistent that she wanted to read Ramona, Age 8 so that's what we checked out next.  She's almost halfway through that.  When she finshes, I think I might encourage her to try something else for school and let her read Ramona on her spare time if she wants.  We'll see...

Spelling

We focused on the soft sound of C this week.  Abby seemed confused about when to use s or c (followed by e) for some sounds.  I'm sure part of that will resolve as she's exposed more to these words.  Regardless, she'll have a bit more review of these words next week than normal.

Handwriting

She worked on letter n and some review, I think.

Math

We are coming to the close of Singapore 2A.  Abby worked on the chapter that focuses on division by 2.  I'd like to keep the momentum we've got going with Singapore rather than switch back to MEP quite yet.  Today, though, we did work on some MEP puzzles.  I'm wondering if maybe this next semester it would be ideal to drop the IP/CWP from Singapore (which we use a year behind, so there's no real challenge) and add in half a lesson of MEP puzzles prior to her Singapore lesson.  We'll have to see what will work when we get the next Singapore set (sometime next week).  Traditionally, the B set of books have a lot of easier topics (money, geography, time) so it might be fine to have some challenging problems by way of MEP...

All Together

History

This week we read about the Mycenaeans.  I need to find some common household items made out of bronze and iron.  The kids understood that the barbarians were able to conquer the Mycenaeans because they had stronger weapons.  They have a hard time remembering that the barbarians had iron weapons and the Mycenaeans had bronze weapons.  I'm hoping we can take them to home depot or something and see/feel the difference.

Science

We did studied crustaceans this week.  The kids even enjoyed checking out our own crustaceans: roly polies!  These are their favorite bugs ever, so it was really easy to encourage them to work on some science this week.  LOL