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 ...