Skip to main content

Weekly Wrap-up ~ Steady


This has been a wonderful, steady week. We have sat down each morning with our books and just worked through our lessons without a hitch. After a crazy Thanksgiving break, it felt good to sit down and learn some new spelling rules. Know what I mean?

The Three R's

Reading. We are about mid-way through Stuart Little. As happens with a lot of books, we are getting much more into it now. After talking with another mom, I was inspired to start a monthly book club with a couple of moms and our 7 and 9 year olds. We have decided to start with Paddle to the Sea by Holling C. Holling. WOW! What a book! There is SO MUCH to learn about while reading it! I have decided to make it our main focus of literature starting after Christmas break. I have found some amazing resources and I will be sharing those with you soon.

wRiting. Writing continues to be a favorite subject (of mine). WriteShop Primary is a great curriculum, and I love it's style. This week Eli and Brynne finished their five-sentence paragraphs on color. Brynne wrote about blue water and Eli wrote about red cherries. They also each wrote a Haiku, since we are studying Japan. We read a great book, Basho and the Fox that reinforced what a "good" haiku is.


aRithmetic. I always feel like we are just slugging along in math. I still love Math Enhancement Programme, and it certainly is my math program of choice. It really stretches them. Sometimes there are tears, but then they realize that they really can do it, so it's rewarding! The only thing I do not like about the program is that, because it's a Hungarian program, it uses the metric system. Next week we start measurements. So, I decided to build our own math unit using living books (Monster Math), Study Jams by Scholastic (Have you ever seen this? It's my Favorite Resource I stumbled across this week!), and printable worksheets to reinforce the concepts. We will also be breaking from MEP briefly after Christmas to start multiplication. I plan to use Multiplication Teaching and Learning Made Easy by Glenda Brown James. Then we'll get back into MEP and finish the second grade level by the end of the year.

The Others

Grammar, spelling and personal reading are moving along nicely. We are just continuing to do a combination of All About Spelling, Reading Rainbow (on the iPad) and Samson's Classroom (for reading comprehension).




We finished up our unit on Japan by doing some origami and learning to count to 10 in Japanese. We also read some picture books: The Girls Who Loved Caterpillars, Nighttime Ninja, and Grandfather's Journey.


We have been doing Family Time Fitness lessons every day. But Thursday the weather was so pretty that we rode bikes and scooters up the library. Then the kids did world geography scavenger hunts on the computer while I picked out our books for next week.

Thursday night was Kyndal's fall athletic banquet at her school. (She was finally well enough to go back to school this week!) She received her varsity letter for cheering.


Next week we are changing things up just a little bit. We are going to replace our geographical study with a mini-unit on Atoms and Molecules (found under "Science Freebies"). We will also be starting our Rediscovering Christmas series, and will be taking a day to read a book by Tomie DePaola for our Virtual Book Club for Kids. And it will be a short week because we have to head back to Oklahoma for a couple of days. We are looking forward to seeing our Co-op friends from there on Friday!

Linking up ...


Comments

  1. The origami looks really fun! I love the Holling books, they are so great.

    ReplyDelete
  2. What a great-looking week!

    I've hear great things about the Holling books as well. Beautiful Feet Books has a geography program based around them that I'm seriously considering getting for next year.

    I'll be watching for more Science and Molecules updates - it looks really interesting.

    ReplyDelete
  3. A solid week!

    How sad is this: we have ALL the Holling books and the kids and I haven't read a one of them. Yep! I should really pull them out and read them to the kids. I have SKIMMED them though! ::wink::

    Thanks for sharing the StudyJams link! They have some things for volcanoes which we're studying.

    ReplyDelete
  4. Looks like a great, steady week :) I have heard so many mentions of Paddle to the Sea, but I have yet to read it! I guess I need to find a copy to look at. Thanks for linking at Favorite Resources, and thanks for the reminder about Scholastic's Study Jams.

    ReplyDelete
  5. Sounds like you guys had an awesome week. Grace loves everything Japan and has tried off and on to learn some Japanese phrases. She says it is a very difficult langauge to learn.
    Blessings
    Diane

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

We all know that in this crazy world of homeschooling, we need all the (adult) support we can get. Please leave a comment if you so wish!

Popular posts from this blog

ABCya

Eli's reading resource teacher shared a website with me yesterday that I would like to pass along. It's called ABCya . There are separate educational sections with fantastic games for ages kindergarten through 5th grade. I browsed the 2nd grade level, and it includes age-appropriate games about Letters, Numbers, Shapes, Geometry, Patterns, Mouse Manipulation, Art and Holiday games. There are lots and lots of fun and creative games for children to play. They are fun, but oh, so educational. Eli's favorite, in his short time playing it, was Create a Car . A lot of the games also have Apps available for purchase (99 cents for most of them) for the iPad and iPhone. I have been looking for another free website for games similar to Starfall , for some time. I think I have found it. I can feel confident having Eli and Brynne play these games.

Cells ~ It's What's for Dinner

Dawson made edible cells on Friday. He made an animal cell pizza ... and a plant cell chocolate chip cookie ... He reviewed what he's learned about cells the past two weeks, and I had dinner made by someone else. Win, win!! I am linking up at Science Sunday at Adventures in Mommydom.

Last Child in the Woods ~ Chapters 1-4

Welcome to our book study of Last Child in the Woods by Richard Louv. To be honest, I have no idea what this "study" is going to look like. I imagine that when we get together I will post about all of the things that caught my eye. And I would ask that you leave a comment, or a link to your own blog post in the comment, about what caught yours. This isn't anything formal, ladies, just a place to talk about what we have read. I have now read the first four chapters of Last Child in the Woods two times. It is just so good. Several things have specifically hit me deep, but in general I just realized that "times, they are a changin'." Things aren't the way they were when we were kids. Chapter 1. Gifts of Nature ~ "When I see birches bend to left and right ... I like to think some boy's been swinging them." ~ Robert Frost What is your definition of nature? What feelings, visions, senses does it conjure up? For me, it's not a