Week 24

PreK:

Emmett did a bit of rod play this week. He built a staircase to earn some candy. When I bribe him, he's more than willing to perform. I took this picture before he put in the last rod. Can you tell which color was missing?

Math:

We worked through MEP Y1 Week 26. Her focus number this week was 15 and she worked through it without complaint.

She asked to do a few problems in Singapore 1B and sped through something like 30 pages. And this is why we work with a few different math curricula!

Language Arts:

We worked through the first step in All About Spelling 2 this week. It is a bit of a more formal review. It is difficult to work with it when Hyrum is awake though!

Abby is still working through her cursive. Even though it's not easy for her, she says it is still her favorite part. This week we worked with the letters u, e and l. She knows six letters now!

In FLL1, we learned that we capitalize proper nouns and what proper nouns are.

Geography:

We learned about Europe this week. With this focus, we mostly talked about famous monuments in Europe.

PE:

There was no PE class this week because of Valentine's Day...

Extra:

Valentine's Day was Tuesday. I think I read Pinkalicious four times that day. Because it was V Day, we made pink cupcakes just like in the book.

On Friday, we did some art stuff. I showed the kids Noah's Ark by Edward Hicks. We discussed the picture and the story of Noah. Then I asked each of them to paint a rainbow.

Daddy's birthday was on Saturday, so we went to the Science Museum and renewed our membership.

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 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.