Week 3

We are on vacation next week for my sister's wedding!  Yeah!

Preschool

Letter Themes

This week's letter was I.  We used ice to paint (frozen, watered-down tempera paints).  She loved the painting part, but did not love that it left her hand all dirty... Ellie does not like to have dirty hands.  (Remember this post?  Hahaha!)

PreK Activity Book

This week we introduced the story of the Goldilocks and the Three Bears.  We've read it before, but it's always fun when "schoolwork" involves a story!  We read it, she retold it (with figures), we made porridge, Daddy read it to her, then she played it on the iPad even!

Junior K

Reading Lessons

Emmett finished up to lesson 70 this week.  He also read a fair amount of Cat in the Hat with me one day.  I printed out a phonics concentration game that he loved playing.  Our rules were a bit different: If you could sound out the word correctly, you earned a hot cheeto. If the word was a real word, you got to keep the cards and go again.  Emmett LOVED it.  Even if the word wasn't real, he'd still say, "But I get a hot cheeto!" Then I'd sound out a nonsense word and he'd say, "You don't get the cards, but you get a hot cheeto!"  It was every bit as neat for him as if he had made all the matches with real words and I had lost every turn.

Math

Emmett's now moving through the pages of Miquon Orange where addition and subtraction problems are on the same page.  Soon I'll have to buy the workbooks for Singapore Level 1.

First Grade

Language Arts

Grammar

Abby has the Months poem completely memorized.  We worked through three lessons and have finally finished the sections on nouns (hallelujah!) and have moved on to pronouns.

Writing

This week's focus was Rumpelstiltzkin.  Abby had a few days where she couldn't focus on anything, so some of her narration this week was harder than typical.  Usually she flies through these types of exercises.

Phonics

Abby is at the very end of her review of Webster's Speller.  She is confidently reading sixth and seventh grade words.  She still tries to guess an entire word sometimes, but when I require her to slow down and do the words a syllable (and sometimes even a sound) at a time, she's more than capable of decoding them.

Reading

Abby finished Mummies in the Morning and then moved on to Pirates Past Noon and finished that one as well!  It's obvious these Magic Tree House books are too easy since she finishes them in one night.  But at least she enjoys them!  For our trip next week, she's picked a Box Car Children book.

Spelling

We completed the first set of multisyllable words in spelling.  She made two errors on Friday, so she'll have review words.  The first error was starting "contest" with a K and the second one was replacing an i with an e.  Like I said, she had a few days with her head in the clouds, so I wonder if these errors were part of that...

Handwriting

We worked through the letter C in New American Cursive.

Math

It was painfully obvious that the math in the section of MEP we were in was too easy.  So, I took a look at the scope and sequence and moved her along a whole four weeks or so.  Still, the work was bordering on too easy.  The only issue we had with math was the same she had the rest of the week.  I think Abby's just looking forward to vacation next week...or something!

All Together

Science

Because we're planning on breaking this coming week, I didn't want to stop our science studies in the middle of a unit.  So, we did three sections of science this week, which allowed us to pause right before we dive into studying the respiratory system.

We studied how our muscles work with a working model that illustrates that our muscles only pull.  I caught Abby sharing that information with her Sunday School teacher later on, so it definitely settled in her brain.

From there, we moved on to discuss how our heart is a very important muscle that pushes blood through our bodies.  We learned that the more oxygen and food our muscles need, the faster our heart pumps.  The kids did different exercises and we monitored their heart rate to illustrate this.  (Can I just say how extremely difficult it is to measure a kid's heart rate while he's squirming around and two other kids are yakking at you at the same time?!)  It was painfully obvious that Abby does not correctly do push-ups since her heart rate for that exercise was the same as her resting heart rate... But, look at Emmett's form!

Finally, we made a working model of blood and illustrated the parts of our blood and why it appears to be red.  We watched a Magic School Bus episode (Inside Ralphie) that was a great introduction to this topic.  Even Emmett can now tell us the four major parts of our blood.

History

We started our week by completing our project from last week.  We made a working model of the Nile River.  When we made it, before we poured the water in, Abby started jumping up and down talking about how we should flood the Nile so there would be crops going on the side "like it really happened!"  This afternoon, she noticed that there is indeed some seed growing and she and Emmett pranced around for fifteen minutes exclaiming that they were just like Egyptian gods for making the Nile flood.

There was only one section in chapter three, which is a good thing because we wanted to do all of the activities surrounding it.  It was on the first writing and comparing the cuneiform of Sumer and the hieroglyphs of ancient Egypt.  

We first made a scroll for our hieroglyphs.  We used paper from our easel.  Abby told me we should have used papyrus to make it more realistic.  

Then, we used oven-bake clay to carve our own messages in cuneiform.

We put them outside to brave the elements while we're gone for this next week.  When we get back, we'll simulate the conditions of leaving these items in the desert for several hundreds of years by placing them in the oven on low heat.