Week 11

ABCs:

We typically do our weekly letter on Friday. Well, this week it didn't even pass into my thought...so we skipped it unintentionally this week. We only have two letters to finish up our alphabet, though!

Math:

Abby moved into the section on numbers larger than ten. We have occasionally called numbers such as 18 "one-ten-eight" or 26 "two-tens-six-units" so the idea that 12 was a "ten and a two" was not foreign to her.

We made it as far as introducing the idea of making a ten to solve addition problems with a sum over ten. The first day I introduced it, it was obviously a new concept and I could see her mind stretching as she tried to grasp the idea. The next day, it was fine and she could figure out how to complete such problems without prompting. We still have stopped here and will play with the idea for a bit while she completes some sheets in her Miquon book. Luckily, some of these sheets go over the exact same "make ten" concept.

She has been fascinated with the concept of odd or even, so one day I had her figure out what each number was and Emmett scribed an "O" or "E" on our number line. By the time he got to 4 or 5, Emmett would shout out the answer at each number too.

Emmett has been very interested in math of late, including proclaiming things like "3 and 3 makes 6!" or "1 and 2 is 3!" or "if Abby has 5, I have 2, and Ellie has 1, how many do we have altogether?" So, I've started him with some very basic Miquon-esque activities. The whole point of these is to really familiarize him with the rods.

And while they are our main manipulative, every once in a while, Abby still feels the whim to build something with the rods. This is her "royal bridge."

Spelling:

Abby is doing very well with AAS1 and is fairly good with remembering the rules that she has learned. We are parking it for a portion, though, because she has a hard time hearing the difference between the /nk/ sounds and /ck/. This week we spelled a lot of our review words, but did not get to the next lesson, which is on plural words.

Reading:

Abby picked up Yertle the Turtle at the library on Tuesday. It's been good to have her read to me because it is slightly easy for her still (though, the Book Wizard has it at a 3.8 reading level?), has some nonsense words to discourage guessing (what Dr. Seuss book does not? :)) and still interests her.

We are continuing on with me reading Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle aloud. We just finished the Selfishness Cure and are coming up on the Radish Cure, which is one of my favorites.

We are still working on some pre-blending/phonemic awareness activities with Emmett. In all reality, there isn't much I can do with him in this area besides read a lot to him. He knows all of his letter sounds, but is developmentally not ready to blend words. We talk about what words begin or end with, what rhymes, play "Say it Fast" and other things.

Unit Study:

We kept up with How to Make a Cherry Pie, but somehow I got so busy teaching that I forgot to take photos. We did the Pledge of Allegiance everyday, talked about the National Anthem and listened to it fairly regularly. We watched episodes of Liberty's Kids. Next week, we will be jumping back in with FIAR.

Week 10

We had a very full week, just not full of school!

Daddy had Monday off and we went to Chuck E Cheese to celebrate Emmett's birthday. Before that, though, we took Hyrum to the doctor because he had been MISERABLE. It turns out he had pharyngotonsillitis. He was happier with a bit of tylenol. He was prescribed an antibiotic for a budding ear infection which seemed to take care of other things because he was like a new baby on Tuesday!

Daddy flew on Tuesday which meant I was with the kids all on my lonesome until about five minutes before bed. That was also a long day.

Wednesday we had a mega-clean. The house has been a mess with a two-year-old to mess it up and a baby to prevent me from cleaning it too much. Daddy's been pitching in, but it needed an over haul.

Before:

After (the carpet even got steam cleaned!):

Also, on Wednesday night we went grocery shopping as a family. We were ending our shopping trip when Ellie stood up in the cart and then fell out and landed on her head on the concrete. She had a severe breath-holding spell and we felt it prudent to take her to the ER to make sure she was okay. Her x-ray and CT came out normal, but it made for a long night.

This left us recovering from that on Thursday...

(You can kind of see the huge knot on her forehead here.)

Friday, Daddy was off and we ran a lot of errands.

Because it was such a long week with many unplanned interruptions, we skipped spelling completely this week and our unit study is stretching into Week 11. We also skipped ABCs and did a lot of crafts in preparation for Halloween this week. That's the beauty of homeschooling!

Crafts:

We were gifted this haunted house activity last year. It's just stickers of windows and doors and boards to stick on the house. Perfect for a two-year-old.

This was a repeat from last year. We use tacky glue on the shiny side of freezer paper and when the glue dries, we peel it off for an awesome spider web. This year, we made thumbprint spiders to put on our webs.

We made spiders out of egg cartons and pipe cleaners.

We made a spiderweb fort that the kids climbed in and out of. Our egg carton spiders hung out on here too.

Abby wove a spiderweb with some yarn.

We also made spiders out of our palms, but for whatever reason, I don't have a picture of that one in action. I do have a picture of our displayed crafts where you can seem them, though. You can also see the glue webs dry. They really come out neat.

Our last craft was the monster we traditionally make out of all the kids' outlines. They think it's awesome with all of that paper on the floor and the markers spread out.

Reading:

I'm still reading Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle as our read-aloud. In the car, we listened to Pippi Longstocking. Abby loved this one almost better than Pooh. We finished the entire audio book within a week. Abby read an assortment of picture books to me for her reading.

Math:

Abby finished off the first unit in Singapore that deals with addition and subtraction. This week the focus was on position and ordering, which was almost like having a break in math.

She continued to review pairs that make ten. She liked playing pyramid solitaire this week.

She also did some measuring pages in her Miquon Orange book.

I've started a bit more formal time for Emmett to work with the rods so he is more familiar with them. He is ready for beginning Miquon/Gattegno stuff, I think. Abby was much older, but having done it with her, I think I could have started her earlier if I had had the resources.

Unit Study:

We've been reading How to Make a Cherry Pie and See the USA and have been talking about symbols of the United States. We discussed the White House, the Liberty Bell, the Pledge of Allegiance and Old Glory. We didn't get through everything I had planned with everything that happened, so we'll continue on with it.

We did watch National Treasure on Thursday...I figured it tied in. And it's a good movie. :)

Swim:

Emmett moved up to a Level 4/5 class. His teacher commented about how he teaches to the group and then to Emmett. He gives the group 2-3 things to work through, and Emmett 9-10 things to work through. Emmett is just that skilled. And he's the youngest by at least two-and-a-half years. LOL

Ellie's kick is coming along. Once she becomes more efficient with it, she will be swimming. She can float with the best of them.

Abby is still working through her breast and butterfly strokes before she moves up to the class Emmett is in.

The kids don't mind waiting through one of their sibling's lesson because it is the only time they get free time with the iPod/iPad and don't have to "pay out" to do it.

Life:

The older two had an impromptu lesson with what bitter is when we were doing our mega-clean on Wednesday. Daddy had left some baking cocoa out and I let them try it out.

They also have been working on doing handstands while playing.

Weeks of 3 and 10 July - DINOSAURS!

I have to say, I need to reconfigure the way I record the weeks. Maybe we'll start just counting them.

We are currently trying to decide on an official "start" date for the sake of records. I'd like to take pictures of Abby (because being in kinder is a milestone) and then do a bit of an all-about-me type sheet. I'm sure the other kids will participate. I also think Daddy is planning on taking off and we'll head to do something really fun that she wouldn't be able to participate in if she were in school.

Abby still brings up going to school occasionally. The last time I reminded her that she'd be staying home like her cousins or like a friend of the family does here in Oklahoma. Then I commented that school is a lot of sitting at a desk and not as much play. She's a quick one, though, and commented, "Mom, that's not true. Kids who go to school do play there. Why would they have playgrounds if they didn't?" I guess you can't argue with that reasoning.

Anyway, on to our week...

Phonics/Reading:

We adjusted the way we did our lessons this week. Instead of them narrated on the computer, I wrote down the words and the things they were reviewing and/or learning in each lesson before the story and we reviewed them on the white board. This seemed a lot more exciting to Abby. The added bonus is that she occasionally wanted to write what I had written so we practiced handwriting too. Score!

After one such lesson, Abby created a reading lesson for me! Though she filled in all the openings of the letters so it's hard to read... It says "Wo th cat steppt in th pond"

And here she is doing her own story time!

ABCs:

We reviewed the letters Z and R these last two weeks. Ellie really is getting into the letters more, which is neat because just plain letters and their sounds is getting too easy for Emmett.

So, we'll be adding in some letter tracing. We've also been playing a blending game in the car where I say a word really drawn out and maybe even with a few pauses between sounds and he tells me the word "the fast way." It was confusing for him at first, but I had Abby demonstrate and he caught on pretty quickly. It is right at his level, too, so it challenges him...and he loves a challenge.

Unit Study:

We are taking a trip to Colorado at the end of this week. While we're there, we're planning on visiting Dinosaur Ridge. Couple that and the fact that Abby has been telling us she's a "dinosaur expert," it was perfect timing for a unit study on dinosaurs. And it was packed full!

On the first day we went to the library and picked up books to add to our 6 or 7 books we already own about dinos. We ended up with 22 items and I had to carefully select those! I should've known that dinosaurs would have taken up a few shelves in the juvenile section. We read nearly 30 different books about dinosaurs!

We learned that dinosaur means "terrible lizard." We talked about what a lizard was and looked up pictures. We even talked a bit about reptiles and what defines them.

We watched a documentary on a dinosaur mummy on Netflix. Abby was enthralled with it and at one point exclaimed, "Look, Mom! That dinosaur DID have scales!" It also prompted a few discussions on what DNA is...at a K level, of course.

We broke out the paints and made dinosaur footprints. Painting is always a hit at our house. These "footprints" aren't hard to make either. Paint a palm, stamp it down (while saying, "STOMP!" of course!) and then add some toes with your thumb.

The kids even got their hair sprayed like dinos. (We only had pink, so imagine it was green.) this one was Emmett's idea. Notice his armor "like a corythosaurus!" he told me.

We picked up dinosaur toys at the store and role-played with those. These little figurines took a beating.

The next day our figurines helped us to learn about fossils as we made our own. We read an awesome Let's Read and Find Out book about fossils and we learned the word "paleontologist."

We did a cute little color-matching file folder game for Ellie, who thinks she is just as old as Abby and demands to participate in nearly everything she is awake for.

On Saturday, when Daddy was off work, we went to the Sam Noble Museum of Natural History. There we got to see dinosaur skeletons.

We got to touch and feel real fossils.

And, of course, they got to do the fossil-dig thing.

The next day, we told the kids that we thought we had spied a dinosaur egg in our back yard. They were so excited to go hunt it out! If you can't tell, it's a watermelon that I (mostly) painted white. They thought the dino egg hunt was great fun.

We also learned where dinosaur bones had been found, which segued very nicely into learning our continents. I tried to have Abby point to them all this past week so she had some review. She seems to get Australia and Asia confused.

We did an awesome summer-time experiment. We froze our trusty dino figures in ice (in layers) and had the kids excavate them out. Emmett loved it and was very into the problem-solving nature of it. I wonder if I had just given Abby the blocks of ice alone if she had kept with it long enough to get the dinosaurs out...or if she would have waited "a few days" like she suggested for the sun to do the job for her.

I gave them many different tools to try and get 'em out: salt, sugar, water, forks, brushes, etc.

They worked in the shade a bit (where I had set them up), but after a few minutes, they decided if they moved the big ice blocks to the sun it would melt quicker.

The first one is freed!

The favorite method to melting was pouring on warm-ish water.

Eventually, though, it was decided that they should just put the ice in some water...which is how the rest of them were freed.

They played with some neat apps on the iPad: Dinosaur Zoo and Ultimate Dinopedia were hits.

Even Hyrum participated in our theme.

Well, okay...this one's better...

We talked about the words carnivore, herbivore and omnivore and found a dinosaur for each carnivore and herbivore and then a picture of the kids for omnivore. They thought that was funny.

Between books, and new words they learned, and fossils, and what happened to the dinosaurs, etc we did a whole lot of learning these past two weeks! A lot of our notebook pieces came from Homeschool Share, but I also made quite a bit of our own. Abby's stuff took up four entire pages!

Read-Alouds:

To go along with our dinosaur theme, we read Dinosaurs Before Dark this week. There were parts where Abby and Emmett were begging to listen to the next chapter, but I declined, just to leave them hanging. They loved it so much we'll be reading the second one, The Knight at Dawn, during our vacation.

Life:

One rainy day I introduced Abby and Emmett to the game of War (without face cards). They liked the game, except the losing part. LOL

Abby and Emmett also got an email from Daddy's parents and Abby typed back her own response. She thought that was pretty neat.