We skipped a week’s review post! Sorry — lots of school but no time to blog about it. In the past two weeks we’ve had a car die, four doctor appointments including a trip out of town, an urgent care visit, one broken bone, a million phone calls to specialists, follow up on a referral to hematology, a lost tooth, a 10th birthday party with 13 crazy kids running around, and prepping for a huge consignment sale; plus the baby is four months and an expert roller from all sides. So I’ve been kept on my toes! Enough about that though. Here’s what the kids have been up to.
Math
The last two weeks has been very math heavy. Lots and lots of bead chains. Lots and lots of formation of numbers work. Michael learned the subtraction snake and worked on four-digit golden bead multiplication.
Josie did so much review work including almost all the short bead chains — she got a huge kick out of the 1 bead chain which is literally one bead with an arrow that says 1. She did stamp game addition and number formation. But the most popular activity of all this week was the new extension I made up based on the exchange game — I’ll write a whole post on how to do it.
My kids have spent so many hours this week working on math facts because of it!
Mary did a ton of addition charts — which are basically for memorizing math facts.
I think the kids are better at math than I am now.
Art
Some Mary art. She’s always drawing — just like me at that age.
We invented our own animals based on animal class. Then they illustrated them using our watercolor basket.
They loved this of course!
Geography
Landforms were introduced this week. Oddly enough no one has taken them out to work with them since the presentation on Tuesday. Too much drying work?
I’ll leave them another week to see if inspiration strikes.
There was a lot more continent work.
Using a pin map.
Science
Much tree of life.
Of course more animal classification. We’ve gone through all of the boxes and read all of our books. I have one last presentation / project for next week I’m excited about, and then we will move onto rock cycles.
We previewed our book for next week because I couldn’t wait anymore: “The Street Beneath My Feet” I read it to Mike first a few days before the girls saw it. So Mike was hip to the secret the book holds (it folds out into a loooong view of the layers of the earth).
Like so:
It ties together everything we’ve been working on so far and everything we’ll be covering in the month ahead, namely the layers of the earth, rock cycle, and caves — it is highly recommended.
Soon we will be studying animal classification by continent with Waseca Biomes Primary curriculum cards — so our geography and science work are very intertwined and topics swap back and forth between our shelves.
Sorting amphibians by continent — from our amphibian box (inside look to come).
Language
Mary’s reading has taken off exponentially. Finally. I have no reason to expect she won’t be above grade level soon. She spends a lot of time working on the Language Works curriculum; she makes her own booklets by sounding out the words. Then she writes and illustrates them. She just requires more practice. She’d rather be doing art — but we’re finding opportunities.
Josie’s been trying to read everything she can get her hands on. She’s working with Lexia Learning (an online reading program I highly recommend for dyslexia). Both girls really need work with sight words so I got a fishing game from Lakeshore Learning. There will likely be more sight word games from there to come!
As for Mike, I haven’t really worked with him or encouraged him to read much lately, and I should. I’m pretty sure he’ll run away with it with just a little practice — which is part of why I put him off. I wish there was more time in the day to work one on one with each kid. I think we’re managing ok without Mike being a fluent reader at five though. I have to continually remind myself he’s quite ahead considering most public school benchmarks.
Music
One of the rhythms we practice in Suzuki violin is Mississippi hot dog. Mike was having some trouble with it so we did some work with play dough.
As far as violin goes lately, Josie has a broken pinky (bow hand) and we had no car to take everyone to orchestra this last week — hopeful our SUV will be back soon. Our other vehicle is a pickup, so not exactly convenient for a family of six. No worries. Making it work.
Misc
The kids participated in a Ninja training day thing today. They loved it.
Practical Life
As for Practical Life work, the girls have been alternating cooking lunch most days (quesadillas and / or eggs). They cracked at least 15 eggs this week, and it never seems to get any less messy. Oh well, we will keep on cracking eggs. How else do you learn but to do?
That’s about it I think. Thanks for checking in on us! Stay tuned for more classification box ideas, reviews and such…
