Last week we took a break and went back to Illinois for my little sister's wedding. The kids had fun swimming, playing, and spending time with their cousins. This past week, we dove back into our regular schoolwork. This next little "session" (if you will) of school will be one of our longest at 9 weeks.
We're missing any updates of
Hyrum because what he usually does during the day is what you'd expect from any toddler: he builds with blocks, he throws things, he eats crayons, potties on the floor, and steals any electronic device he can get his hands on.
Preschool
Letter Themes
Our letter this week was B. We used balls with black, blue and brown paint to bounce all over our two Bs. When they dried, we stuck them together to make butterflies!
Ellie still is not very sure about all this paint business. LOL
PreK Activity Book
This week was a mish-mash of a few things. On one page, there were two faces missing a few features. The first one was missing his eyes and she got that right away. After placing the stickers on, she looked confused about what else would be missing. Finally,
Emmett prompted her that he was missing his hair.
Ellie said, "No he's not, he's just like my daddy!" LOL The next picture was missing her mouth. She could not figure out what was missing, though. I kept trying to prompt her to feel her face. She noted eyes, cheeks, chin, eyebrows, ears, hair, eyelashes, etc. but not mouth for whatever reason. Then, I asked her what was on her face. She said, "frosting" (we had had donuts that morning). LOL So then I asked her what was below her nose. "Umm...boogers?" Hahaha. Finally, she realized that there was no mouth and she was so annoyed that HOW DARE THEY FORGET THAT?!
The book also worked on name recognition. She can now tell me, a letter at a time, how to spell her name. She could recite it for a while, but now she knows what it means. In fact, one day she was telling me the letters like so, "Big E. L. Another L! Uhhmmmm.... dot letter. [I] And a little e!"
She is very pleased that she can now write her own big letter E. Obviously we need to work on her utensil grip, but she's only three!
Junior K
Reading Lessons
Emmett is very impatient that Funnix is so methodical. This week, we tried moving to every other lesson, which was much less annoying for him. He completed through lesson 77. Obviously, every other lesson won't work if the story at the end is broken into parts, but that's okay.
Math
Emmett's slowed down a bit in the math department. He understands adding and addition, but because he's so young, we're kind of parking it until he gets a really good grip with his number bonds/addition facts to ten. He's got his doubles down, he knows the 1s and the 0s. This only really leaves a few. Really, though, before he moves on, I would like him to be solid in the number bonds of ten. He knows half of them, so we've been playing games to solidify the rest.
Handwriting - New!
Emmett has started experimenting with writing letters, so I've started slowly introducing him to handwriting. His pencil grip is really quite amazing for a four-year-old boy! He has a proper tripod grip (whereas Abby's has become something of a quadropod grip).
First Grade
Language Arts
Grammar
We worked through most of the lessons on pronouns.
Abby only struggled memorizing one string of pronouns: him, her, he, she, it, his, hers, its. It's a lot of random words for a six-year-old. And the book didn't say they HAD to be memorized, so I'm good with just being really familiar with it.
Writing
Writing With Ease focused on
Alice in Wonderland this week. The first narration wasn't difficult for
Abby, but the second was rather confusing since she really doesn't know what a court or jury or anything similar is.
Phonics turned to
Reading to Mom
Abby's completed her phonics review, so we'll be moving on to oral reading from McGuffey's Readers. I flipped through a few (because they're free on the public domain) and realized that, while she could do the fourth reader, the third is probably less frustrating for her at this point. And, according to what I've read, via Lexile analyzer McGuffey's Third Eclectic Reader is about a 5th-6th grade level. So, we'll stay there where the content might a bit more appropriate.
Reading
Abby read the first few chapter in a Boxcar Children book this week. I don't think she'll finish it, though, as she didn't particularly care for it.
Spelling
We finished the step in AAS that begins teaching syllable division. She reviewed (because this is still review) that we can break words up into smaller words or we can find the vowels and if their is one consonant, it usually goes with the second syllable. She was quick to remind me that if there are two, we split between them. That's part of the NEXT step.
Handwriting
Hah! I got much better about keeping up with this. We are doing shorter steps, but more frequent work. Unfortunately, I only get better towards the end of the week, so we still only completed the letter D. Hopefully next week we will be able to complete three letters or close to it.
Math
Abby's basically finished the first half of MEP y2. The only frustration for her has come when MEP is trying to introduce a topic. MEP is a spiral curriculum, so it introduces a topic or method that is supposed to be done completely with help and with the teacher. It's kind of like a little peek into what's coming. This causes
Abby to FREAK OUT because she does not know how to do it and she thinks she should be able to complete the problem RIGHT THEN. Instead, the curriculum fully intends the children to take a little nibble, let it percolate in the back of their mind, and then it comes back to it at a later date.
Regardless, because
Abby's completed a semester in MEP (and rather early at that), I've order Singapore 2a and we'll take a few weeks working through that. I find that Singapore and MEP complement each other nicely. When
Abby gets frustrated with one, we move back to the other and so on. Until Singapore comes in, we've just been setting a timer and working nicely through some Miquon.
Abby calls this "fun" math and often completes three or four sheets in half an hour.
All Together
Science
This week we learned about our respiratory system.
Emmett amazes me with the love he has for science. He does not want to miss any lesson. And he retains! It was actually amazing to me that he could tell me all the four parts of blood even AFTER we took a week off! Of course,
Abby loves science too, so that helps. They just see it as a bunch of fun and games. And, because the older kids love science,
Ellie has decided it's all neato too and kept complaining until I made her her own book.
The first part of this week, we did a lab to compare our respiratory rates after different activities. Then, we compared our respiratory rate chart with our heart rate chart.
On Thursday, the kids pretended that they were a giant's red blood cells and took oxygen (red M&Ms) through the respiratory system and exchanged them for carbon dioxide at the giant's foot (blue M&Ms).
Of course, this required
Ellie to sort the M&Ms by color first...
History
While we were gone for the week, we left our clay tablets and scroll out in the yard. By the time we got back, the scroll was kind of worse for wear. Most of the paint had run because it had rained while we were gone. In order to stimulate the dry conditions of being in the dessert for hundreds of years, we put both the clay table and the scroll in the oven at a low temp. This little exercise sure did make the differences real to the kids. The scroll was pretty beat up, but
Abby's tablet survived and she's chosen to hang it from her bed post.
This week we read from chapter four, which talked about mummies and pyramids. We watched
this video on YouTube, which was really a good spoof. We made the Great Pyramid out of blocks. And, of course, we began the process of making our own chicken mummy. The kids were all ecstatic about this and, of course, it became a family project. We've named our mummy "King Cluck."
