Skip to main content

Weekly Wrap-Up ~ Outside in Oklahoma

This week we adjusted our schedule to give this mom teacher some down time. I found that with adding a new part-time professional life of my own to my already busy schedule of teaching at home, following up with two public school children, caring for dogs, a home and, too infrequently, my husband, that I was just overdoing it.

Our schedule adjustment was slight but necessary. We arranged for all of Dawson and Brynne's work on Thursday to be independent work so that I could sit in my chair and chill. I am available, just not up running here and there. That means we have to hit it extra hard on Wednesday, but it's totally worth it come Thursday.

Brynne ~ 1st Grade

We are continuing our 3 R's by reading three or four letter-of-the-week books each week, this week being "P". Brynne does letter-of-the-week activities (tracer, mini-book, word search). She does two phonic pages from a workbook we have, and is currently being introduced to verbs (nothing too heavy). Not much actual writing practice happened this week.

It was a pretty week in Oklahoma this week. So we took some of our lessons outside.


We really did this with Math. On one afternoon Brynne would ride her scooter down the driveway and I would yell math facts out to her. She would see how many she could answer on her path down, through the garage and back to me.


On another day we were learning about grouping numbers using tally marks. I made her a scavenger hunt of items found outside and she walked around and tallied how many she could find.


I told her that this next week I will write math facts on the driveway with sidewalk chalk and she can answer them.

We combined science and social studies this week by reading United Tweets of America. This book identifies the state birds of all of the United States. We got out Brynne's U.S. Wipeable Map. She would choose a state and we looked up the state bird. She chose Oklahoma, Missouri (where her grandparents live), Indiana (where her penpal lives), Florida (where we are going on vacation) and Wyoming, North Dakota and Colorado (where we went on our Yellowstone vacation). We also determined which birds were used in the most states.

We read more about the Scissor-tail Flycatcher, which is Oklahoma's state bird, and listened to calls and watched flight videos. She also colored a coloring sheet. We watched videos of the song "Oklahoma", our state song, on Youtube. And we made a 'tornado in a jar' because we live in 'tornado alley'. And we read a couple of books about Oklahoma.

We concluded our week by going to Coop for some play time.

Dawson ~ 8th Grade

The Middle Ages are so interesting and fun to learn about! We focused this week on families and classes of people. Dawson made his own Family Seal, designing it himself with two crossing swords.

He finished his stained-glass project.


For science we observed how well our herbs are growing! We purchased a small greenhouse to keep our herbs in, as well as to start some seeds for peppers, broccoli, spinach and other veggies.


We learned about the topics of vegetative propogation, water movement and respiration, and the roles of leaves, roots and stems. We attempted an experiment to see how water moves up the veins in different leaves. Our leaves around here are all dead, but it did work a little bit.



We are reading Adam of the Road by Elizabeth Janet Gray. This week it mentioned the London Bridge, so Dawson did some research on the origins of the song and facts about the bridge. He also did some exercises in paraphrasing.

He is one week away from completing Life of Fred: Decimals and Percents and after Spring Break will be moving onto Life of Fred: Pre-Algebra with Biology.

We are linking up to Weird, Unsocialized Homeschoolers.

Comments

  1. I love your creative ways of practicing math facts:) We've been doing some school outdoors as well here in AR, the weather has been so nice!

    ReplyDelete
  2. What a great way to make math real and hands-on! Our weathers just started being a bit more spring like--it's time to head out doors.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Ditto! I love how you practiced Brynne's math facts! (I do addition facts with my 6-year-old while he swings! LOL) Beautiful stained glass from Dawson! I want your weather! LOL It IS warming up here finally - some days we're about freezing!

    Jessy

    ReplyDelete
  4. Please tell Dawson that his stained glass project turned out great!

    Sarah

    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.

A Thomas Jefferson Education "This Week in History" ~ Schoolhouse Review

Talk about a GOLD MINE! A Thomas Jefferson Education's This Week in History by Rachel DeMille is her "labor of love" ... and I absolutely LOVE it! " This Week in History is a daily resource that brings your home school or classroom to life." For just $9.99 per month, you can log onto TJEd.com and click the "This Week in History" link to obtain many, many, many resources tied to specific events that occurred in the upcoming week in history. Or even better, you can receive the summaries and links to ALL resources right in your email Inbox each week! It doesn't get any easier than that! What does this really look like in real life? Each week, I receive an email from Rachel DeMille that sets out each date of the coming week. Under the date, there are listed anywhere from one to several events that occurred in history on that date. THEN there are ALL kinds of things to do related to that event, such as books to read, websites to visit, ac

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.