Week 31

We are zooming towards completion of the school year!

Tot School:

My two-year-old has a death wish! In the last two weeks she has ripped the nailbed of her thumb completely off, stuck a safety pin up her nose (thankfully it was closed and she coughed it out - yuck!), and then burned the tops of all four of her fingers on her right hand.

Her right hand is completely out of commission, but that doesn't stop her. She is one tough chick, that's for sure!

We are continuing on our light little bear theme and made maps for We're Going on a Bear Hunt. You can find the pictures here.

On Saturday, we took the kids on a bear hunt...

... at the zoo!

While we were there, we stopped to see the lions. Hyrum really caught their attention!

Language Arts:

Emmett finished up this week at lesson 34. He is just past a third of the way through it!

Abby started a Mercy Watson book for her reading. She is enjoying the frivolousness of the plot, but also enjoying applying the rules for multisyllabic words she's learned in spelling.

Spelling this week focused on silent e words, which were very simple for her.

She still likes doing spelling on the iPad too.

In grammar, she did some picture narration and started memorizing a new poem: "Hearts Are Like Doors."

We are still working through James and the Giant Peach. Abby and Emmett laugh at whatever the centipede said, especially the part about him taking off and putting on all of his shoes.

Math:

Emmett did some building with C rods.

Abby finished up MEP year 1! The last few weeks included a lot of review. We did a small amount of work with a lot of different things. We did some work with clocks...

...skip counting...

(jumping on every third number)

...patterning...

...and a bit of "machine" work.

She also became interested in fractions recently (now that she is "five-and-three-quarters"), so we did a bit of talking about that. C rods once again proved to be the perfect manipulative.

Geography:

In geography this week we learned about North America. We discussed the Equator and how if you get further from there, the colder it gets.

We also started Abby on Evan-Moor's daily geography grade 1, though it is still a bit easy for her. She seems to get a kick that her grade work is above "kindergarten." LOL

Gymnastics:

The kids are still enjoying their gymnastics.

Their skills are improving and Abby is now excited to move to the older class after she turns six.

They each surprise me with the things they are accomplishing.

And, just for kicks, this is how Hyrum does school:

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!