Week 20

PreK:

Emmett worked a bit through his workbook, enjoyed riding his bike, and played with our rods some. His favorite game was when I made pictures for the base ten flats and put them on the flats for "buildings." He made a road with the rods and pretended he had a doctor who got in his car at his house, drove to the hospital and then went to McDonald's for lunch.

He's actually surprised me with knowing a select few addition facts.

Math:

We're still working through MEP 1B with Abby. There wasn't a meltdown at all this week. One day took forever, but the rest only took somewhere around 15-20 minutes. What changed? I set an hour for math and told her if she finished early she could play on the iPad. Her motivation sure did change!

MEP 1 focuses on the building of certain numbers at a time. This week the focus was on eleven.

She's not counting on her fingers, she's just excited that she built 11!

Thursday's lesson had her working problems like 20-8-?=11 and 15-?+3=7. At first she panicked, but when I told her she could use a number line, she was able to complete them with no problem.

She completed week 22 without any issue.

Reading:

I ordered Sonlight's Reading Schedule to give us a bit of direction in our reading. When I gave Abby the placement test, she placed into grade 4-5 readers.

For the last little bit, we've required her to read to us without any real direction. And while she enjoys reading, there is lots of why-do-I-have-tos when we asked her to read aloud. I know she enjoys it (she reads in her bed for about 45 min at night)... In light of this, and because she's only 5, I chose to start with the grade 2 readers. Though, we did jump into the grade 2 ones about halfway through with Owl At Home. The first day we had a bit of resistance, but when she realized I was asking her to read aloud easy books to me, she became a lot more agreeable. Last night she told me her favorite part of the day was reading to me. And no, I'm not worried about the readers being too easy because they'll ramp up soon enough. And like I said, she's only five.

For read-aloud, I began reading the Boxcar Children to her right before bed. She's enjoying the extra time that she's allowed to stay up to listen to the story.

Emmett is a bit more difficult to read aloud to. He constantly moves, zones out, and has a hard time imagining...or something. When we talk with him about the story, he is not able to remember as much as one would expect. Because of those things, we've decided to focus on reading Emmett things that he would like rather than things that we think most of the children would be okay with. We think maybe he is just enduring storytime sometimes. So Daddy's been reading Dragonology and the Dragonology Handbook to him and he has been loving that.

Science:

We continued our unit on magnets this week and focused on the poles of a magnet. We made them float, we pushed a car without touching it, and we felt the push of two north poles trying to touch.

Geography:

We moved on to Africa this week and learned about the pyramids and the the Nile. We learned about different animals in Africa (elephant, lion, giraffe, camel, etc). Abby was fascinated with the pyramids and mummies. When I opened our DK Eyewitness book on Mummies and looked through some of the pages she seemed grotesquely fascinated. I was expecting that response. She also seemed a little scared and looked up at me and said, "Mummies don't come back to life, do they?" LOL Someone's been watching a bit too much Scooby Doo.

Extra:

• I've been slowly sorting through what things we'll be using with first grade and wondering how I'm going to not go insane when we add in a few more pieces of curricula. I'm also excited to start certain ones. After seeing Abby's fascination with mummies and some Ancient Egypt things, I'm excited to see how she reacts to Story of the World. I will also admit to being slightly nerdy and enjoying history and being excited just because I like the subject. LOL Because I'm trying to get my ducks in a row, though, I decided it was time to layer on some more responsibility for the two-year-old. So, this week, Ellie got her very own chore board.

• We also visited the zoo this week. It was busy because the zoo was packed and free (our zoo is free on Mondays in January and February). We got there about feeding time and saw this awesome snake with his food in his tank. We were hoping to watch him eat it, but the kids were too distracting to him.

• This coming Monday is our 100th day of school! Daddy is taking the day off and we are going to have a party. The kids are pumped!

Week 19

We are getting to point where FIAR will be a fill-in-the-gaps or school-lite type of program. We started FIAR stuff about a year ago and have gone through quite a few books. A lot of the books left are ones that are either out of print, I don't own and our library doesn't have, or about subjects I'm not quite ready to introduce to my very naive five-year-old.

So, we will be dropping FIAR soon as a main program. We are awesome about completing some reading and some math each day. Soon, we will be adding in science (twice a week), history (twice a week), music/art (once a week), grammar (daily), and writing (daily). History and science will be the big add-ins, though, and will affect our afternoons. I don't want to shortchange Abby the chance to have "summer break" or my chance to plan, though. So, I thought we'd try out doing some "school" in the afternoons by working in some geography/history/community helpers type social studies and science-ish unit studies. In a couple of months we'll take a long break so we will be able to be on break when the nice weather peaks here.

PreK:

Emmett is enjoying his workbook. It's something like this and it's perfect for him because he is still required to "do school" but he enjoys the puzzles. The stickers are perfect because his fine motor schools aren't quite where he'd have an easy time writing answers. I don't know why they make preK books that kids are supposed to fill out page after page...even Abby didn't do workbooks like that at this age!

Emmett is also still tagging along where he is interested.

Math:

On Tuesday, Abby and I were working some through Singapore Math's Intensive Practice. She picked a page and I hopped in the shower because she had told me she wanted to do it herself. She chose a page that had problems like "I am less than 5+2 and more than 6-3." She'd completed three problems and was moving on to number four when I got back to her. She was sitting at the dining room table and I moved to unload the dishwasher when she had a Math Meltdown. "I can't doooo iiiiit! It's tooooo hhhhhaaaaard!"

So I sat next to her: "Abby, what's 5 and 2?"

"I dooon't knowww!" (Which is totally untrue because she's known those facts for a bit.)

"Here are your rods. If the white is one, pull out five and two."

"I can't find them!"

"Build your staircase." *sigh*

After working through problem four, she went and happily completed five and six. I have no clue what was up with just that one problem... and six was harder than the others!

A different day, we did math with the iPad and our new styluses. I didn't correct the problems, the monsters in the drawing app did. That drew Emmett in and he wanted to do it too.

Mostly for math, though, we completed lessons in MEP 1B (Week 21). MEP 1B is a perfect segue from Singapore 1A to Singapore 1B for Abby. Her ability to add past ten is coming, though. It is becoming a lot less convoluted for her.

Spelling:

I picked up How to Teach Spelling this week. I'm waiting for the workbook and hopefully we'll jump into this. Both All About Spelling and How to Teach Spelling are based on the Orton-Gillingham approach. HTTS is more workbooky, which is fine for Abby. If we like it, HTTS will be cheaper...and I like cheaper. :)

Reading:

Abby's been reading books of her choice of late.

For our Seuss unit-ish study, we read through Did I Ever Tell You How Lucky You Are?

We also finished up Mrs. Piggle Wiggle and picked up The Boxcar Children.

Science:

We've started our science talks with magnets.

We learned about what magnets pick up.

We found some ways we use magnets in our everyday lives.

We discussed the force and strength of magnets and measured the strength of different magnets we had.

We also found that our magnets weren't as strong when we tried to pull a piece straight up.

I asked the kids if they knew what force was preventing the magnet from moving as easily and Abby immediately responded, "GRAVITY!" We haven't formally discussed gravity, so it was nice to hear that she has been exposed to the idea somewhere.

After our "experiments" we did some playing with our magnets.

Geography:

As an introduction to our new add-ins, we are working through the continents specifically. Soon, we will be ready for history.

This week we studied Asia. We learned about Mt. Everest, the Great Wall of China, and animals of Asia (giant panda, arctic fox, Asian elephant and tiger).

Abby loves to get on BrainPop Jr., so we watched any pertinent videos on there.

Extras:

We got a chance to play with some Moon Dough on Friday.

Daddy's been training the kitties to stand for their treat. He never thought he'd like having a cat this much!

It's obvious that science was the new exciting thing here this week. It's work for them at all. All I have to do is mention "science" and they get giddy to find out what we're doing that day!