This week we took another step toward full days of school. We did all our Language Arts and Math each day and next week we will add in our content subjects.
Vicki had a little bit of a light week since she had a cold the past few days. She is continuing to enjoy using the large puzzle pieces to work on phonics. We now have a full selection of short /a/ words for her to work on. In order to get a puzzle piece, she needs to tell me what the word says. Then she would bounce along the pieces already down to the next space, put the new piece in, and do a little dance. When we finished, we pulled the words off the puzzles since next week we will be starting short /e/ words.
She also did the second of her word family flowers. She read each word before she added it to her flower.
We used the AAS whiteboard to go over some sentences….
and finished up with sentences on a large easel pad. Some of the sentences are from OPGTR and some are ones I just made up using the words she knows. My original intention was for her to read the words in red, while I would read the words in blue since they weren’t ones that I’ve introduced yet. She’s getting better at recognizing “the” and surprisingly, she also knew “on”, “with”, and “and”.
She worked on a few pages in ETC, finished Lesson 1 and started Lesson 2.
For math, she did some Preschool Probability (from Confessions of a Homeschooler) and did some counting activities.
She did a few pages in her HWT this week and practiced some writing on the chalkboard.
I bought some small mechanical pencils for her to use since she seemed to have trouble with full size pencils but really wanted to use something besides crayons. She ended up using up the entire lead in at least 3 of them since they broke so easily. I may just take some of our regular pencils and break them in half instead.
She spent a bunch of time playing with clear gems on a piece of felt. My intention is to have her use them to build sight words but for now she just likes making designs.
Georgie had a good week with slightly less than the usual amount of whining.
I printed out some reading comprehension from Evan Moor Teacher’s File Box to use instead of the Spectrum Grade 2 Reading workbook that seemed to be too easy for him. I printed four lessons - “The Dog Ate My Homework”, “The Messiest Room in Town”, “The Koala” and “Alligators and Crocodiles”. They were all listed under 3rd Grade although two had Lexile levels of 510 and 530 (late 2nd, early 3rd grade level) and the other two were Lexile levels 700 and 710 (early 4th grade). He did really well with these although definitely had to think a little harder than he did with his workbook. He thought “The Dog Ate My Homework” and “The Messiest Room in Town” were really funny and enjoyed reading them.
There were a few new vocabulary words in each one that were new to him (restriction, marsupial), as well as exercises dealing with antonyms, contractions, and synonyms.
Only in the “Alligator and Crocodiles” did he need to look back at the sample to get answers. This may partially be due to the whining he did while reading it the first time.
He had a new Mad Libs book to do this week. His old book was Mad Libs Jr. so it gave him a list of possible words. The new book only tells him the part of speech. He did one of the puzzles and then, since the book had a Ninja theme…..
he actually requested his journal to write a story about a ninja. I am thrilled with how excited he is about her journal. I have some writing prompts prepared for him to use but right now I’m just glad he is voluntarily (even eagerly!) writing and drawing. Even if I give him prompts, I fully expect him to put his own personal spin on them.
He added some Pokemon stickers he received for doing his reading to his journal as well.
We finished AAS2 – Step 1 this week. He remembered all the rules that were for review this week and, for the first time, I had him do the dictation sentences at the end of the lesson. He had no problem remembering the sentences long enough to write them but kept wanting to put his own spin on them, like switching “red backpack” to “blue backpack” or writing “no trucks” in a sign. Since the point was to remember the rules for when to use ck versus k, I let him get away with it. 
Math Mammoth is continuing to go well. We worked on place value to 1000’s this week and, like all the place value we’ve done so far, complete understanding came right away.
He thought the fractions page was “too easy” but then proceeded to do it all wrong. Once he was willing to listen to an explanation, he had no trouble with it. He had to color one section of each circle that was divided into 2, 3, 4, 5 or 6 sections and decide which fractions were larger. He colored the one section red, “YAH, red for success” and then decided he needed to color all the other sections blue “blue, sad, poor blue, they weren’t chosen”.
I didn’t give him any of his Addition/Subtraction riddles this week but he did 4 of his Algebra Readiness Made Easy pages without any trouble.
Since Georgie’s writing is always done in all uppercase unless it’s actually in his HWT book, I decided to go ahead and start the 2nd grade “Printing Power” book with him. It offers a lot of review of lowercase letters and hopefully cursive will help with proper formation and using the proper case since it’s hard to write all caps in cursive.
Also this week, we had a field trip with 4-H Cloverbuds to a local petting farm.
Next week we will start Spanish, Art, Music and Literature, and hopefully finish up our Rocks & Minerals study.
No comments:
Post a Comment