Week 31

Preschool

Letter Craft

We did letter Q this week.  Ellie was very excited to make a girly figure for her queen.  Hyrum enjoyed tagging along with his q, and thought the googly eyes and glue stick were fantastic.  (And of course, he was excited about just the idea of a big letter.)

She drew her own nose and placed the additions on her own.

Junior K

Language

Reading

Owl at Home is definitely more difficult for Emmett than the previous books he had been reading.  It's not unattainable, but the there's a lot more sounding out going on.  We've repeated a few stories for fluency which helps immensely.  A couple of days we took a break and did Little Bear's Friend, which is definitely comfortably at his level.  Yesterday we went to the park and he did his reading there.

Emmett also picked up a Splat the Cat book that he read on his own at bedtime.  I told him we could pick more up at the library, and he seemed pleased about that.

Spelling

Emmett spelled words with beginning blends this week.  AAS says that beginning blends are usually more difficult for students, but he seemed to do a lot better with the beginning blends over the ending blends.  We repeated and reviewed a bunch of words from last week as well.

Math

Emmett worked on subtraction mostly this week.  The curriculum also moved on to position and ordinal numbers, which he found very easy.  He needs some solidification of his facts.  He can figure them, but I'd prefer them a bit more automatic.  We might play some games with it or maybe just have him do some extra Miquon sheets before his next few lessons.

First Grade

Language

Grammar

Abby continued copying and illustrating her poem about the year.  She also learned about commas separating words and numbers in a list.

Writing

Writing this week came from some poetry selections.  The copywork was longer, which was surprisingly not an issue.  Abby also narrated the poetry back really well, which was interesting because the language used is not colloquial.

Reading

Abby finished up the Whipping Boy this week, but didn't care for the book AT ALL.  She could tell me what happened in short snippets, but didn't understand some of the smaller nuances.  Nor did she care about any of those nuances as she really didn't care for the book.

I bought Because of Winn-Dixie for her to begin on Thursday.  When I handed her the book to read, she asked if Winn-Dixie was the dog.  When I answered in the affirmative, she skipped off happily and devoured the beginning of the book.  After only two days of reading, she is already a third of the way through the book and enjoying it greatly.

Spelling

Abby learned another way to spell the sound of "ee" this week.  Specifically, the curriculum taught that if the "ee" sound is at the end of a multisyllabic word, we usually use "y."  She also learned that we typically double consonants to protect a short vowel (ie, the difference between happy and hapy).

Handwriting

We had a full week with Daddy flying and gone most of the week.  As a result, I was a lot busier with the kids.  Cursive is the first thing that got dropped.  She only completed lowercase v this week.

Math

Abby completed the rest of fractions.  She will have a review on Monday, I think, but will move on to other concepts next week.  I might pull out the Miquon fraction pages as she has enjoyed those in the past.

All Together

History

We finished up our chapter on China.  The kids enjoyed talking about the Great Wall and the Terracotta Army.  I think it might be fun this weekend to make our own clay soldiers...but we might use Play Doh instead.  :)

Science

We observed our strawberry plants growing and read a few more books on photosynthesis.  I was ready to move on in RSO, but we need a plant that has a few good leaves and we're still not there yet.  I'm hoping to plant a bean plant this weekend so we might be able to use it... Of course, with the weather turning nicer, we also spent a lot of time outside.  :)