Week of 07 August

School starts the 22nd of August! That week, I think, I'll start numbering our weeks... So I guess this coming week is our last of summer...

Phonics/Reading:

Abby and Emmett tried out Reading Eggs this week. The Homeschool Buyers Co-op has it on sale and I thought we'd try it out. It was really a good game for Emmett, but Abby was pretty much past it.

We haven't done any formal phonics instruction for a while...we've just been having Abby read to me. She's working on Balto, but I haven't been great about having her read it to me everyday. She has been reading pages here and there randomly during our story time when we're doing our picture books. She's only 5. There's lots of time for more formal reading. :)

Emmett surprised me this week. For the last couple of months we've been playing a game we call Say It Fast. I segment CVC words into their separate sounds have him blend them together. So, when we were playing with our letter magnets and we had the magnets B, A, and T he did the sounds, "/b/" ... "/a/"... "/t/." And then I said, "Say it fast!" thinking it was probably a little beyond him. Imagine my surprise when said, "BAT!" His face was nearly glowing with excitement when I said, "Good reading!" He was so pleased with himself. :) I guess we'll add in some CVC sounds with his letter review.

Math:

I have been reviewing what we'll be doing for math in preparation for school starting. I had a hard time deciding between RightStart and Miquon. RS has had GREAT reviews for a good foundation. Miquon, I've heard is a very different, but awesome program as well. I LOVE Miquon for its use of Cuisenaire Rods. I LOVE C Rods because they are somewhat of a visual display of how I manipulate numbers and math concepts in my head. I finally decided that it wouldn't hurt if we did both. :)

So, I ordered RightStart Level A. It got here and I quickly read through some of the lessons and felt a little nervous because it all seemed really simple for Abby. I made my way over to the RightStart website and took their placement quiz thing and it said to place Abby in Level B. Whoops. I emailed the RightStart people and the lady that (quickly) got back to me said it truly did sound like Abby was ready for Level B. Well, sheesh! I got lucky and found someone who was selling Level B and the worksheets for a steal. It's a good thing I ordered the extra manipulatives for B with the A starter pack. (I was really trying to reach $150 to get free shipping from Rainbow Resource...) I'm still not bummed that I have A. I think it will be perfect for Emmett in a few months.

While all this was going on, though, we played and built with our rods. Abby hasn't seemed nearly as interested in the rods as Emmett, but since I was playing with them too, she joined in. We played some games that encouraged the building of trains and stairs and she amazed me with how aware she was with the rods even if she hadn't sat and familiarized herself with the colors and relationships between them. She seemed to intuitively "get it."

And the abacuses have been already claimed, even though we've only had them for a few days.

The standard came with the starter kit we got, and I ordered an extra junior one. I guess I should order another one because these are a hit!

Five in a Row:

This week we rowed The Story of Ferdinand. The older kids happily sat for this one!

Social Studies:

We found Spain on our map and talked about the Iberian peninsula. Then we discussed what a peninsula was. It really did sink in because even this afternoon Abby was pointing out different peninsulas on our map.

Language Arts:

In the manual, one of the language arts lessons in interjections. I tried to tell Abby that it would be easy to find an interjection in our book because it was a short word followed by an exclamation mark. And Abby looked at me like I had three heads. Apparently, Abby had seen exclamation marks, but she didnt' know what they were. So, I dumped the lesson on interjections and we talked about exclamation points.

We also talked about repetition in stories. The kids pointed out a few repeated phrases. The kids noticed this carried over to another book we had checked out of the library, What's the Magic Word? by Kelly Dipuchio.

Applied Math:

We measured ourselves.

Art:

We acted out a few different scenarios from the book.

This one is Abby sitting on a bee:

And this one is Emmett being the matador after Ferdinand would not fight:

Science:

We discussed about flowers and labeled their parts. Emmett's paper was on trees and Abby's on flowers. Abby asked, "So, Emmett's has a trunk...is that like a trees stem?" Love the natural discoveries kids make!

And here are Abby's notebook pages for Ferdinand:

Life:

We had crazy wind this week and the kids found a bird's nest in our yard after one of them. They thought it was so neat and loved to pick it up and inspect it. We looked on the internet about birds and how they built their nests. It was a neat impromptu lesson.

I got these cookie sheets on sale at Target and I think they'll be nice for entertaining kids while I'm working with another. (I'm thinking magnet play, rice, sand, play-dough, etc...) Yes, there will be mess...but when is there not when you have four kids five and under? I made magnets out of pom-poms as one option to play with them. The kids thought they were a neat blast too. This will especially good for Ellie and some of her fine motor skills work.

I glued eyes on a few pom-poms too. Emmett made a caterpillar out of his.

Read-Aloud:

We've been reading Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and Abby has been loving it. We're about 50-60 pages from the end. Abby's asked me if we can read Harry Potter next. I guess we'll see. LOL I did ask her if she liked Charlie and she said she did, "It's much better than those other books...you know...the ones without chapters." LOL

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.

Week of 10 Apr

Phonics/Reading:

We are keeping going with Funnix 2. I keep looking at the library to see if they have a copy of The Ordinary Parent's Guide to Teaching Reading. I was thinking I'd go over some sound combinations and find a few game ideas to play to keep things interesting... We are getting close to taking a break with Funnix 2 and I think OPGTR might be a different option to do during those breaks. If I had a ton of money, I could find other options, but seeing as it is supplementary, I'll just wait till I can get it from the library. She doesn't mind Funnix and it is building her fluency, confidence and speed, but a break is always nice too...

ABCs:

Emmett did the letter H this week. We watched some Leapfrog, wrote Hs in the carpet, did some wet-dry-try, pasted our H on our coconut tree, and then topped it all of with a worksheet. He still loves doing his letters.

Five in a Row:

Emmett was ecstatic when I pulled out Harold and the Purple Crayon on Monday. Once upon a time (probably sometime last year), Abby pulled a DVD off the shelf at the library that was based on this book. It's done by HBO Family and we now own a copy of it because they love it. So, there was much excitement that we were reading the book (again!) and doing a unit on it.

Here they are watching the DVD. The first episode actually stays fairly true to the book, which is neat.

For Family Home Evening we played what we called a "Harold Game" using our dry erase boards and purple markers. It was mostly just Pictionary, but the older kids really enjoyed it.

This is Abby's dog:

Emmett insisted that Daddy show him step-by-step how to draw each item.

We watched some YouTube videos on how crayons are made and then we tried our hands at melting down and mixing some of our own crayons. This turned into a bit of a talk about primary and secondary colors and experimenting with what colors we get when we mix certain ones.

Before:

After: (You can't really tell from the picture, but the crayons really did melt into orange, purple and green!)

We even did some fun swirly crayons:

We let the older kids draw with their newly-shaped/created crayons, but it didn't last long. Ellie loves them, though. She loves to take them out of the containers, place them in different spots, stack them, color with them, place them back in the container, repeat, etc.

We talked about the setting of this story and where it takes place. Abby was the first to pipe up, "In Harold's imagination!" So, of course, we drew our own imaginary story. Sadly, I don't have pictures of those, but they came out pretty cute.

We also observed how Harold gets around in the story and what other ways we get around. Emmett's favorite was the hot air balloon. Abby's favorite to remember was an AWACS (it's the jet Daddy flies on for work).

We have been loosely keeping things together in notebooks for the kids. I guess you could call it notebooking. I like the idea of keeping everything together in one central place. We've done one for each story, but apparently am only now getting around to type about it. If we write anything, or create anything, or what-have-you, we just stick it in their notebooks. We have since come to love double-sided tape (much better than glue sticks)!

This is Emmett's for Harold:

Handwriting:

I didn't think we'd do a specific handwriting for a while. I learned to write without one. My mom just showed me how to form the letters and I did a lot of copying her. Abby, however, is totally a workbook-loving kid and it's easier for me to give her a sheet to do...only because she doesn't complain at all. In fact, she asks to do more! So, she is currently doing the kindergarten-level book from Zaner-Bloser and she loves it.

Read-Aloud:

Because we finished up My Father's Dragon last week, we just did some picture books this week. Here's Daddy reading Purplicious to all three kids. The Pinkalicious books are favorites around here.

We did pick up The Littles for our next chapter book. My kids have seen the TV series thanks to Netflix. I hope they enjoy the book just as much!

Church:

I think I have found something for Church-related activities for the kids. I'm not sure exactly how it will go because we haven't implemented it yet, but I am thinking the School of Abraham's review of Gospel Principles will fit in nicely. Instead of bouncing around in their scriptures, like they are now, we will do each day's lesson right before bed. It's all very tentative, though, because Daddy heads up scripture-time with them. As long as I have it prepared, though, it shouldn't be too much...