Spring Break! and Week 30

We took our spring break the last week of March. The kids and I enjoyed being off and just doing fun things together. (Though, I did have Abby do a few minutes of math and reading each night!)

We visited the zoo...

Daddy was lucky enough to be off one day so we rented a movie and had an impromptu movie night, just during the day!

We also went to the science museum.

It was so nice to be off! We do have to finish our last little bits of curriculum, though, and we will enjoy a slower summer!

-----

So, back to work this last week!

Tot Schol:

We focused a lot on sensory activities for the last bit. We made white mud, which was like a huge giant spit wad. The older kids had fun with it.

Ellie tried it.

She didn't care for it much.

Eventually, we filled the table with bubble solution which was better all around.

Daddy showed them how to use a straw to make a lot of bubbles. We both thought Ellie would love it. She did...until she sucked some up. "I don't like it. It tastes nasty." LOL

Of course, she was read to a lot all week.

She even is branching out beyond the Pinkalicious series.

Hyrum doesn't care what we read to him...just as long as he gets to bang on the book a couple of times.

Language Arts:

Emmett is still working at the rate of one lesson a day in 100 Easy Lessons. He worked up through Lesson 30 this week.

Abby finished up the Magic Tree House she started a few weeks ago.

In grammar, she memorized the poem Work, though I didn't get a video of her doing it. She also narrated a story and worked a bit with common and proper nouns.

In spelling, Abby worked with splitting words into separate syllables.

She also has started taking sentences from dictation.

She loves to do spelling on the iPad!

Math:

Emmett is still familiarizing himself with the rods. We play the "stumping game" where one person tries to stump another to make a train from two rods that is the length of the rod chosen.

MEP and Miquon took Abby through a few different kinds of problems this week. Mostly there was focusing on measuring...

...and symmetry.

Abby still enjoys a bit of rod play as well.

We also had a chance to use money in a real-world situation. (And no, they don't travel in the car like this. We were at Sonic.)

Geography:

This week we focused on naming the continents and oceans. It was a bit of review for Abby, but it was a good lesson for Emmett. He still sings the songs fairly frequently to point out which continent is which, but he now understands that we are not just arbitrarily pointing to any spot on the map.

We also got this new wall sticker, which was neat for the kids to put up. There was even the Southern Ocean! (Our big map doesn't have the Southern Ocean.) Sadly, though, there was no Europe sticker, which is really maddening!

Gymnastics:

The kids are really enjoying their gymnastics class. Abby keeps practicing her handstands and is actually getting better at them.

I have to be on the floor to help Ellie out while the older two are also in class, so I can't just take a ton of pictures. What I get on my phone in passing is what I get. Emmett is the blurry one on the circular tramp.

And Abby is the blurry one doing seat drops.

This is one of the best things about homeschooling! My kids are all still good friends and enjoy doing things together (ESPECIALLY the iPad)!

Week 28

While my older kids were all better this past week, my baby has been afflicted with ear infections. After we tried to treat the infections, we learned he is allergic to cephalosporins.

With all of that going on, it was a bit of a rough week on Mom. I feel like I held together really well, though...just with a baby on my hip ALL OF THE TIME.

Tot School:

Ellie has been known to climb up to the table and tell us she is "doing maff." She loves to line up the dominoes when we pull them out, so I thought she'd get a kick out of the c rods and their track.

She flitted about us this week drawing random pictures and scribbles and declaring each notepad she saw hers.

PreK:

Emmett completed five lessons from 100 Easy Lessons. He is now up to reading short sentences in the book for "stories."

We've been reading We're Going on a Bear Hunt this week.

Emmett's been playing with these cards from Homeschool Creations. They've been a good review of counting past ten.

I also highly recommend this audio CD which reads the book, but also has a slew of activities to go along with it. It has been a huge hit here.

Math:

We worked through Week 30 of MEP 1B. This week focused on number bonds to 20, which Abby found extraordinarily easy. I think we're getting to the point where I should start pulling in a few problems from Singapore to give us a bit of a different approach... We'll see...

She does enjoy the problems that involve Roman Numerals and enjoyed creating some problems for me. This led to extending the lesson to learning the numerals for 50 and 100.

Language Arts:

Abby completed three or four lessons of grammar. This book is so gentle and repetitive that sometimes she gets ahead of the lesson. For example, this last week was on streets and proper nouns...so then, Abby moved on, "Well, our city is XXX. That's a specific place; it's a proper noun! And we live in Oklahoma, and THAT's a proper noun!" In the meantime, she's gone past what the first lesson was on and has now moved into the lessons previously. I guess she gets it... LOL

We took spelling a bit slower this week and reviewed the multisyllabic words, phrases and sentences from the last step.

Because Abby's so young, she doesn't write quickly, so writing out several words at once can be laborious. I've just been having her write three or four words, one or two phrases, and one sentence a day. We'll move on to the next step next week.

In cursive, Abby started work with the "roll" motion in preparation for writing humped letters.

Abby's still reading her Magic Tree House book to me. She was so excited to read it, but having her sit down and read to me is like pulling teeth of late. I have no clue why as she reads well and hardly has to break apart even foreign words. She enjoys the story when she does read it... Who knows? LOL

I am still reading Pinocchio to the kids. Abby would love to read more than one chapter a night, but Emmett can only do so much listening and I want him to enjoy the read-alouds too. This book will take nearly a month to get through if we are working at this pace consistently...

Geography:

We started off with a little review of our oceans. This was especially useful for Emmett.

This week was our last week for landforms. We discussed valleys and canyons and watched video on the Grand Canyon.

PE:

The kids are still taking their gymnastics class and enjoying it a lot. I'm looking forward to when Ellie is three and I don't have to be out on the floor with her. It's harder to drag Hyrum around while making sure she is doing what she's supposed to.

The kids have even been practicing some of their flexibility at home.

Extra:

Daddy took Monday off and we visited the Science Museum. Our museum has a lot of neat and hands-on exhibits.

They also do a "Science Live" show where they do real experiments on stage. This is a somewhat scripted show, but still fun for the kids. The last one they did was chemistry. They've since redone it to work a bit on physics. Abby was chosen twice to be up on stage and help.

The first time was to demonstrate the principals behind Bernoulli's Baseball.

The second time she was chosen specifically because she had worn light-up shoes and they wanted to demonstrate the Van de Graaf generator. She was so funny this time because the nature of the experiment required her to touch the boy she stood next to. She would only barely touch him with the point of her finger, as though he would transmit some kind of disease to her. LOL

And, of course, we've had beautiful weather and the kids have had plenty of outside-and-messy time!

Week of 13 Feb

Phonics/ABCs:

Abby is just moving right along with Funnix and her reading. She just finished lesson 69 out of 120 lessons. This week she also read nearly the entire Green and Eggs and Ham to me. She at first told me she couldn't do it, but when I opened the book and had her try, she was amazed that she could do nearly all the words. The stories in her reading program are getting more content in it too, so it's not as boring listening to those, either.

Emmett has been learning about the letter "m" this week. Last week we did "t," so I'm hoping this next week to cover "e" and we'll have done all the letters in his name.

"M" is for Monster:


Tracing the "m":


"M" on Funnix's website:


Writing more letters in his "M" mini book:

Scriptures:

We've started focusing a bit more on the Book of Mormon using the Scripture Stories series that the Church puts out. This week we focused on the first chapter, which tells about how we got the Book of Mormon and the Joseph Smith story. So, to highlight that we've been writing the first part of James 1:5. The kids enjoy writing it and they can even sort of say it from memory.

Life:

We made decorations for Valentine's Day for a few days too.

This one I took from No Time For Flashcards:

We also decorated mailboxes to house our valentines:

We found these magnets at Target for a really good deal, so I thought we'd try to reinforce the days of the week. Abby gets that there are specific days in certain order, but she still has difficulty with the sequence of it all. She'll get it.

We also took a day and visited Science Museum Oklahoma. We're on our third membership to this museum and the kids still love it.

The weather here has been beautiful, so the kids have also had a ton of play time too!

Swim:

The kids started a new session in their swim lessons. The great thing is that they're the only kids in their class with two teachers...so they're basically receiving private lessons at the moment. The only bummer is that the lessons are a little later than we would've liked, but we're dealing by moving bedtime back an hour.

Mom and Dad:

Daddy and I were super pleased to learn we were the only two in our developmental psychology class to earn 100% on our latest exam. Unfortunately, it was a short-lived victory because now I have like four chapters of European History to catch up on in preparation for my exam this coming week. We just have to keep plugging along with it! The fun thing is that we are finally into the section of developmental psychology that is interesting to both of us. In the last two weeks we've covered the prenatal stage and the infant/toddler stage. It sure isn't as difficult to remember all of this information compared to five different psychological theories and their characteristics!