Saturday, October 29, 2016

Weekly Wrap-Up Week 8: Halloween, Pumpkin Patches and Cinquains

Last week was mainly about Halloween but we did manage to get some school done, despite the excitement.

Vicki is on the last unit of Evan Moor Spell & Write Grade 5.  We will move on to the Grade 6 book which is the last in the series and then we are done with Spelling except for corrections in writing. This is by far the subject she is having the least trouble with this year.

This weeks lesson included writing some Cinquains about food.

Pizza
Cheesy, Orange
Sticky, Stretchy, HOT
Hot on my tongue
Pizza

She has been continuing to struggle with math, writing, and even literature now.  She seems to get tired (and very cranky) easily, which leads to being careless.  I'm going to encourage her to take a break in the middle of her binder work to do her hour of reading or her hour of screen free.  Hopefully this will help.  I also may start sitting with her for more of her work.

Vicki is still working through Little House on the Prairie during her assigned reading time.   At bedtime, she's been reading on the Epic books app and has read through 12 of Big Nate books.

Squidy continued to work on ratios in MM and algebra in Zaccaro.   He's doing very well with both, I think partially because both are very logical at this stage.

For assigned reading this week, he read My Side of the Mountain, The Lion The Witch and The Wardrobe, and started Prince Caspian.  His bedtime reading in Epic has moved on from Big Nate to Garfield and Peanuts comics, a couple Timmy Failure, and some Minecraft stories.

Eventually I will be pulling some of their assigned reading from Epic.

Last week was, of course, all about Halloween.   We finally made our trip out to the Pumpkin Patch to pick out our pumpkins.  This year, Vicki wanted to carve her pumpkin while Squidy wanted to paint his like Charmander.

It was a beautiful, but windy day when we headed out.


First we hit the corn maze.  Squidy took off at a run and played hide and seek the whole time, while Vicki and I "searched" for him at a much more leisurely pace.



Then, we picked our pumpkins.  My rule has always been the kids had to be able to pick up their own pumpkins.  :-)  Anything bigger is a family pumpkin.  Well, Vicki was able to pick up her 21 pound pumpkin all by herself.


Squidy went much smaller.


When we got home, Daddy and Vicki got to carving.



At first, she tried to remove the guts with a spoon, but soon found out it was better to just get right in there with your (gloved) hands.


Our finished products:



The kids also colored some wooden haunted houses from Michael's.  They came with three colors of paint and a paint brush but there were so many small areas to color, I thought it would work better with gel pens and fine tipped Sharpies.


We had our first Trunk or Treat on Friday night.  This year we decided to decorate a car as a Mad Scientist's Lab since our 4-H Club is the Mad STEM Scientists.   It was an EXTREMELY cold night.  Halloween is a weird time of year in NJ.  Some years it will be in the 70's, other years it's in the 30's.  Makes it very hard to plan costumes.



This year the kids dressed as Pokemon.

Vicki was a Gardevoir...



While Squidy was a Quagsire.




We have another Trunk or Treat down at the lake and, of course, Trick or Treating on Monday.

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