It’s been a month since I did a weekly wrap-up. We have continued to do some school during that time (including our 4-H Global Awareness activities and field trip, which I will blog about next), but we’ve also finished planting the garden, enjoying some of the summer weather, getting to know some of the babies that have joined our birds (we appear to have a young cardinal, downy woodpecker, and bluebird) and just relaxing.
I’ve also been working on (once again) rearranging things. The kids will be doing school with a sitter a couple times a week (either Granny Kaye or Big Sis Stephanie) but we never know which days until the weekend before. So, I’ve been working on figuring out a system that will work well both at home with me and with someone else, possibly at a different location. I ended up making just a few minor changes.
Georgie was already working out of a weekly binder for his math and language arts and his set-up hasn’t changed.
The big change will be for Vicki. She now has her own weekly binder that holds her math pages, and handwriting page or a note about what page she should do in her HWT book, the fluency pages from AAR and also for AAR, a plastic page from a photo book that will hold an index card outlining what to do, any word/phonogram cards that are needed for the lesson, and any activity pieces.
Both kids also now have backpacks they can use to hold their binders, reading books, pencil boxes full of supplies, and fun stuff to do once school is finished. Anything that uses the large whiteboard and letter tiles for AAS will be done at home with me, along with any big projects, and all history, science, art, music, etc.
And now, to show what actual progress we have made….
LANGUAGE ARTS
Vicki
AAR : She is LOVING AAR. I’m loving that it really seems to be working, and that she has readers that are at a perfect level. We recently did an activity involving egg shapes and a spatula and she continued to use the spatula for days after. She insisted I put the word cards down “on the grill” so she could flip them with the spatula. We are up to Lesson 16 and have introduced the /th/ sound, which gave her some trouble. She wanted to pronounce it /f/.
HWT K: She’s doing much better with the extra practice on the chalkboard. She is up to pg 60 and should be starting the 1st grade book by September. She still is resistant to writing outside of her workbook, even when writing for fun she will just make scribbles.
Games: We played quite a few phonics, rhyming and sight word games but the only new one was Sight Word Safari that I found through Pinterest. She really had fun even though she couldn’t read all the words (those she couldn’t read, I just read for her).
Readers: She’s been reading through both the Level 1 and Level 2 AAR1 readers, plus her TAG books, and some easy Dr. Seuss.
George
HWT 3: We’ve barely begun cursive but so far it’s going okay. I would say it’s no better and no worse than his printing.
Evan Moor Skill Sharpeners Spell and Write Gr 3: Recent activities for spelling included homophones, capitalization and punctuation.
Evan Moor Daily Reading Comprehension Gr 4: He’s having no trouble with any of these any more, and they have led to him wanting to know more about some of the topics covered (like the differences between rats and mice).
The Wand: We finished up the activities for Owl Moon. We may not move on until September.
Evan Moor Word-A-Day: He says these are too easy but there is occasionally a word he doesn’t know.
Reading: In the past few weeks he has read: Dragon Slayer’s Academy: The New Kid at School, Dragon Slayer’s Academy: Revenge of the Dragon Lady, Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH, and Dairy of a Wimpy Kid (four times). I’m going to try and find more Dragon Slayer’s Academy and Wimpy Kid books for him since he really enjoyed those.
MATH
Vicki
Evan Moor Skill Sharpeners Math Gr 1: She is still doing well. She is up to page 43 and has covered addition, subtraction, geometry, patterns, graphing, and time.
I think I’m going to pull out some of her old wipe-off books to get her some practice in writing numbers. I think this is one of the areas that HWT is weak in.
Games: We played lots of math games recently, including: Hickory Dickory Clock and Shark Attack (from Scholastic 15 Fun and Easy Games for Young Learners: Math), Shape Fill-in, and Add/Sub to 12. We also did some skip counting by 2’s using shoes.
George
Math Mammoth (3B, 4A, 4B): He has finished Division in 3B and is currently in the last chapter (for him) Multiplication. He is working on Chapter 1 in 4A but we have put Fractions in 4B on hold for now. We worked on lining up lists of numbers for addition and subtraction, using graph paper.
Beast Academy 3A: He is almost finished with 3A and I’m still trying to decide if we will continue with 3B.
Scholastic Algebra Readiness Made Easy Gr 4: Now that he’s slowed down and follows the steps, he is again finding these too easy.
Scholastic Solve the Riddle Math Practice Multiplication and Division: He’s doing well with these and they are great for drill.
Scholastic Logic Posters, Problems and Puzzles: We have been working on grid puzzles together. He REALLY enjoys these so I’m going to have to find more.
Math Games: He was having some trouble with place value to the millions so I pulled out the old place value cards (similar to these ones but we had them up to 10,000 place) and made additional cards to cover all the way to the millions. We spent a couple days going over them and he once again decided it was too easy. We also played some Yahtzee and Money Bags.
The next week is going to be very slow because Georgie is on vacation with Granny Franny.
And here’s more bird pictures (and one bug picture).
No comments:
Post a Comment