Week 19

It looks like I took all of one picture of schoolwork this week...

Preschool

Craft

We cut out snowflakes this week!  Scissors are a great exercise in fine motor skills and Ellie struggles with these as well. We have these scissors where she can grip the whole of the scissors with her hand.  She LOVED them for this activity.

PreK Activity Book

Ellie reviewed patterning and drawing dots and lines.  The book also had her color in a boat.  She is our first child to have any interest in coloring and staying in the lines at this age.  The older two were just interested in drawing, no coloring please.

Junior K

Language

Reading

Emmett has made the jump to self-identifying as a reader!  He climbs in bed and starts to sound out/read books.  He usually reads Little Critter books on his own.

Spelling

We introduced the letter tiles and sound cards this week.  Emmett focused on identifying vowels and consonants.

Math

We played some games as a family in the evening...but adding two dice together was about all he did this week.

First Grade

Language

Grammar

Abby did lessons 82 and 83 this week, which focused on Mr. Nobody.  This poem is longer than others that she's memorized, so we're taking it in chunks.  She's already got the first stanza down (and so does Emmett!).

Writing

Her selections came from The Light Princess by George MacDonald.  She was intrigued by this story and might be one we have to read together in the future.

Reading

I was a bit slow in getting to the library, so she read a few picture books that were history and science related.  She did begin Charlotte's Web on her own on Friday.

Spelling

Here is where my only picture comes in!  This week Abby learned that words don't end in u or v.  Now she knows that "English words don't end in i, j, u, or v."  In order to save the words from ending in u or v, she learned that we typically add a silent e at the end of the word.

Handwriting

Abby did O this week.  O has a harder connector in cursive so I thought it might be difficult for her, but with the simplicity of the letter shape, she did just fine.

Math

She did the section involving dividing by 3.  This was frustrating for her because she doesn't have her 3 multiplication facts memorized.  So, in order for her to figure it out, she had to either skip count or pull out her rods...which apparently made her feel dumb because she couldn't just KNOW the answer.

All Together

Science

This week we discussed amphibians.  We compared the metamorphosis of frogs and butterflies or incomplete and complete metamorphosis.  The kids made life cycle wheels for that.  They also learned about how newts "hear" with their legs.  We did a lab that displayed how sound travels and that really it's just movement.  Part of the lab involved playing with a slinky, so of course that was fun!

History

We learned about the Medes and the Persians this week.  The kids learned about Cyrus the Great and how he became the leader in Persia and then moved over and conquered all the way to the Indus River and then back through and even conquered Babylon!  (Apparently, Babylon is Abby's favorite.)  We left off with the cliffhanger that there was one country that the Persians didn't conquer - Greece!