Weekly Wrap-up 10/25-10/29/10

We had a pretty good week this week.  We did lots of Halloween activities (here) and even some science (here). 

Georgie did a lot of writing this week since I was trying to get back on track from letting it go the last few weeks.   We worked on correct formation of letters Dd, Ee and Ff this week.   He still insists on doing all his writing in uppercase letters for his other programs (AAS and ETC) but we're continuing to work on emphasizing lowercase letters.

AAS is continuing to go well.  We finished up Lesson 6 (short a words) and Georgie has mastered Word Cards 1-10. Vicki pointed out that cat rhymes with hat, so she may even learn something from this program.   We did Lesson 7 (short I words) and I think we have a pretty good routine going now.  The first day I show him the Word Cards and have him read them.  The second day I have him spell the Word Cards with tiles and spell some of the additional words using his wipe board or orally.  The third day I have him spell the Word Cards by writing them down and on the fourth day we finish up any of the additional words we didn’t get to.  Although, when I wanted him to just write the words, he insisted on doing them with the tiles as well.

Georgie does tend to go off on tangents when we do AAS.   When we did “big” he observed that he knew other words with ig and spelled “pig” and “dig” on his own.  He also talks to the tiles - “go away ‘h’, it’s ‘t’s turn to come over”  I have decided to relax a little and give Georgie the chance to play his little games with the word tiles.  In between him setting up his games, I asked him to spell or read some words.    His most recent game was to put up a word ending (he did –ish, –et and –un), then he would pull out three other tiles and ask which one goes in front of the word ending.  He says he likes playing these games because he gets to be the one in charge.

We did the short i lessons in ETC.  I’m trying to match these up with our AAS for as long as we can.  Once we finish the short vowels I don’t think we will be able to anymore.

We read a couple of emergent readers from Hubbards Cupboard for the short i word families.  Georgie likes these short little readers.  I like that they put the words we are working on into some context and throws in a few high frequency words as well.   In addition to these readers Georgie is reading any of the books we have that he can.  So far he's done Brown Bear, Brown Bear, Hop on Pop, Great Day for Up, The Nose Book and That's Not My Puppy all by himself.  It is very exciting for him when he can read a whole book.

MEP math is continuing to go well.  Since Georgie did so much writing this week, I did a lot of the writing for him with our math programs.   In MEP we are working on understanding, adding and subtracting 0, 1 and 2.

We continued working on nickels using our money worksheets.  Georgie understood this much better this week.  He was able to give the correct value for various combinations of nickels and pennies without any problem.  I think this was helped a lot by the fact he could already count by 5’s.

This week in Time our worksheets covered digital clocks.  Georgie has been fascinated with our digital clock for a while but it was good for him to learn how the digital clock relates to the clock face.  We are still doing time to the hour but I think we will need to move on soon since he is finding it very easy.

We played a Math game using craft sticks this week.  Each stick had a number on it and was placed in a cup.  Georgie picked two sticks, added them together and looked for the sum on his board.   After a while he became inpatient and drew 3 or 4 sticks at a time.  He added them together by re-grouping them.  When he pulled the numbers 1, 9, 8 and 1 he solved it by saying 9+1 is 10, 8+1 is 9, 9+10 is 19!  I don’t know where he learned this since even his extra games and worksheets don’t go beyond adding two single digit numbers.

We played another game that was just for Vicki this week.  She seems to be having trouble being consistent with counting objects.  Sometimes she does okay, sometimes she jumps all over.  So, I printed out a simple grid and we played a game where we rolled a dice and then stamped the correct number of spaces while counting them out loud.  I made the grid small thinking she would get bored quickly but the 15 spaces I did were not enough.  I think I may print out some more interesting game board type sheets for this – ones that wind around and have a start and finish.

In addition, Vicki did a letter C search page using a bingo dabber.

She glued C pictures to a letter C.  She covered it so well you can no longer see the C.  (The C is from Confessions of a Homeschooler.)

She also put together a caterpillar and we saw a real live caterpillar on our trip to the pumpkin patch.  She put down a loop of glue and for some reason didn’t want to use more so she had to squeeze her caterpillar onto the glue.  I don’t remember where I found the caterpillar but I think it was also from Confessions of a Homeschooler.


I may have to rethink the filing system we set-up.  I love having everything sorted and ready to go but there are too many things where Georgie is moving faster than I expected him too.  I don’t feel the need to do the 30 pages our workbook has on Time to the Hour if he already has it figured out but this is how I have it filed.  If I pull from later weeks, I will have to keep rearranging, something I’ve already had to do for ETC and AAS.  I may have to change and sort by subject – MEP math, Time, Money, AAS, etc.  This way if he moves faster it’s not a problem and if he gets stuck and needs to move slower, we can do that too.