Week 21

PreK:

Emmett didn't do much formal this week. He enjoyed tagging along where he wanted to, but mostly played with Ellie while Abby did her thing. I did get him playing with some C rods a bit.

Math:

We worked through Week 23 of MEP 1B. Our focus number was twelve this week. Abby was off this week, though, and we had lots of resistance.

You can sort of see her daydreaming a bit here:

So, each day we quickly worked through our MEP 1B sheet and then jumped into some Miquon. Miquon is a lot more fun for her right now.

I do want her to continue to work through the MEP because there is so much practice and problem-solving in those lessons. I think she's just getting bored with the focusing on just one number. I am getting to a point where I'm starting to believe that she is telling me it's "too hard" and she "can't do it" not because she can't, but because she doesn't WANT to. I think it is her way of asking for a challenge. At first that seemed counterintuitive. Why would she tell me it was too hard if she is ready to move on? But the more I evaluate, the more I realize she is more capable of doing things she struggled with a bit ago. A few weeks ago, she was struggling to get through the process of adding past ten. This week I realized that she doesn't know those facts off the top of her head, but she can figure them without a problem. Soon, they will become rote.

Besides...when in math do you get to build little sheep pens with your manips?

Spelling:

We reviewed some words from AAS 1. She still is retaining the rules that she learned. We will work through How to Spell Simultaneously with AAS 2 (I think) until I decide which we want to continue with. Which means...I need to order AAS 2.

Reading:

Abby completed week 23 in Sonlight's grade 2 readers this week, which means she read Frog and Toad are Friends. These books are still really easy for her, which is fine as they are confidence building. She does not like to sound words out at all and gets frustrated when she doesn't know a word right away. For as much as she loves to be read to, you think she'd love reading. She does, to a degree, but it is very frustrating for her because she wants to know every word at first glance.

On her free time, she read several different books in our library box, including books with a reading level as high as 4.9. When compared to this, it's painfully obvious that grade 2 readers are a easy for her. But sometimes it's nice to have "work" be easy.

We finished up The Boxcar Children this week and have moved on to Mr. Popper's Penguins. We've done this one before, but we're reading it again so we can watch the movie for movie night.

Science:

I was planning on finishing up our magnetism mini-unit this week, but that didn't happen. Whoops! We'll move it on down to next wek.

Geography:

We discussed North America this week. We discussed the Grand Canyon, the Great Lakes and the Panama Canal. Of course, we also talked about animals native to this region.

When we do these studies, we listen to the Teacher and the Rockbots song called "Continents." Abby loves it because we dance around and it ties in quite nicely to the continent of the week.

Extra:

• Our weather has been chilly here, but despite that we took the kids to ride their bikes this last week. Abby has been running around with Emmett's old balance bike and the improvement has been remarkable. Her confidence is soaring this way.

• Monday was our 100th day of school! We celebrated quite well. Daddy took the day off, we had friends over, ordered pizza, made 100-day hats and even went to the movies! It was quite the party!

• On Fridays, I try to let the kids do a fun craft/art project that is completely geared toward the process. This week, we did stamps and everyone loved it.

• We also got Life of Fred this week. We're going to work slowly through the first book, but Abby already loves it. She thinks it's silly and definitely fun. We even made her her own "turn to play" book.

Week 19

We are getting to point where FIAR will be a fill-in-the-gaps or school-lite type of program. We started FIAR stuff about a year ago and have gone through quite a few books. A lot of the books left are ones that are either out of print, I don't own and our library doesn't have, or about subjects I'm not quite ready to introduce to my very naive five-year-old.

So, we will be dropping FIAR soon as a main program. We are awesome about completing some reading and some math each day. Soon, we will be adding in science (twice a week), history (twice a week), music/art (once a week), grammar (daily), and writing (daily). History and science will be the big add-ins, though, and will affect our afternoons. I don't want to shortchange Abby the chance to have "summer break" or my chance to plan, though. So, I thought we'd try out doing some "school" in the afternoons by working in some geography/history/community helpers type social studies and science-ish unit studies. In a couple of months we'll take a long break so we will be able to be on break when the nice weather peaks here.

PreK:

Emmett is enjoying his workbook. It's something like this and it's perfect for him because he is still required to "do school" but he enjoys the puzzles. The stickers are perfect because his fine motor schools aren't quite where he'd have an easy time writing answers. I don't know why they make preK books that kids are supposed to fill out page after page...even Abby didn't do workbooks like that at this age!

Emmett is also still tagging along where he is interested.

Math:

On Tuesday, Abby and I were working some through Singapore Math's Intensive Practice. She picked a page and I hopped in the shower because she had told me she wanted to do it herself. She chose a page that had problems like "I am less than 5+2 and more than 6-3." She'd completed three problems and was moving on to number four when I got back to her. She was sitting at the dining room table and I moved to unload the dishwasher when she had a Math Meltdown. "I can't doooo iiiiit! It's tooooo hhhhhaaaaard!"

So I sat next to her: "Abby, what's 5 and 2?"

"I dooon't knowww!" (Which is totally untrue because she's known those facts for a bit.)

"Here are your rods. If the white is one, pull out five and two."

"I can't find them!"

"Build your staircase." *sigh*

After working through problem four, she went and happily completed five and six. I have no clue what was up with just that one problem... and six was harder than the others!

A different day, we did math with the iPad and our new styluses. I didn't correct the problems, the monsters in the drawing app did. That drew Emmett in and he wanted to do it too.

Mostly for math, though, we completed lessons in MEP 1B (Week 21). MEP 1B is a perfect segue from Singapore 1A to Singapore 1B for Abby. Her ability to add past ten is coming, though. It is becoming a lot less convoluted for her.

Spelling:

I picked up How to Teach Spelling this week. I'm waiting for the workbook and hopefully we'll jump into this. Both All About Spelling and How to Teach Spelling are based on the Orton-Gillingham approach. HTTS is more workbooky, which is fine for Abby. If we like it, HTTS will be cheaper...and I like cheaper. :)

Reading:

Abby's been reading books of her choice of late.

For our Seuss unit-ish study, we read through Did I Ever Tell You How Lucky You Are?

We also finished up Mrs. Piggle Wiggle and picked up The Boxcar Children.

Science:

We've started our science talks with magnets.

We learned about what magnets pick up.

We found some ways we use magnets in our everyday lives.

We discussed the force and strength of magnets and measured the strength of different magnets we had.

We also found that our magnets weren't as strong when we tried to pull a piece straight up.

I asked the kids if they knew what force was preventing the magnet from moving as easily and Abby immediately responded, "GRAVITY!" We haven't formally discussed gravity, so it was nice to hear that she has been exposed to the idea somewhere.

After our "experiments" we did some playing with our magnets.

Geography:

As an introduction to our new add-ins, we are working through the continents specifically. Soon, we will be ready for history.

This week we studied Asia. We learned about Mt. Everest, the Great Wall of China, and animals of Asia (giant panda, arctic fox, Asian elephant and tiger).

Abby loves to get on BrainPop Jr., so we watched any pertinent videos on there.

Extras:

We got a chance to play with some Moon Dough on Friday.

Daddy's been training the kitties to stand for their treat. He never thought he'd like having a cat this much!

It's obvious that science was the new exciting thing here this week. It's work for them at all. All I have to do is mention "science" and they get giddy to find out what we're doing that day!